================================================================= ALAWON Volume 7, Number 78 ISSN 1069-7799 June 26, 1998 American Library Association Washington Office Newsline In this issue: (137 lines) ACTION NEEDED: YOUR HELP IS NEEDED NOW; PLEASE SEND E-MAIL TO CONGRESS _________________________________________________________________ The following is an ALA Washington Office flyer distributed today at ALA Annual Conference. Please help by adding your voice to those of conference attendees who are contacting their Members of Congress while in Washington, D.C. ACTION ALERT: Congress must take three critical actions soon to avoid major harm to libraries and educational institutions. Your help is needed to contact Congress to express the urgency and importance of following key messages: * PROTECT THE E-RATE. Don't allow further cuts or delays to the telecommunications discounts for schools and libraries. * PROTECT FAIR USE. Don't update copyright owners' rights for cyberspace without also updating information users privileges. * RESPECT LOCAL DECISION-MAKING ON INTERNET ACCESS POLICIES. Don't hold federal funds for libraries and schools hostage to federal filtering requirements. CONTACTING CONGRESS: In order to help deliver your messages to Congress, the ALA Washington Office has expanded its Web site to include legislator look-up, sample letters, and background on these issues. Please go to the ALA Washington Office home page at http://www.ala.org/washoff/ and click on the LEGISLATIVE ALERT button to use the Legislative Action Center. (Also, please e-mail comments about this new service to: cwt@alawash.org) Traditional mail, faxes and phone calls are still very important to your member of Congress. Please call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard (202-224-3121) and ask for your legislator's office, or call the local district office. BACKGROUND: (1) TELECOM DISCOUNTS: PROTECT THE E-RATE -- The e-rate provides K-12 schools and public libraries discounts of 20-90 percent on telecommunications services, Internet services, and internal connections as part of universal service provisions in the Telecommunications Act. The e-rate was one of the few public service obligations imposed on carriers in return for deregulation in 1996. More than 30,000 schools and libraries have completed the application process (requesting approximately $2 billion in discounts), secured local and state level approval, and committed other financial resources for ineligible hardware, software, training, and the non-discounted portion of discounted services. Plans for this year's school and library programs have been made based on congressional promises and Federal Communications Commission commitments that funding would be available. Communities can't afford any further delays or cutbacks to this program. The FCC has already cut funding by 40 percent and may be forced to halt the discounts under pressure from congressional critics and local and long distance phone companies. (2) COPYRIGHT: PROTECT FAIR USE -- Copyright treaty implementation bills (S. 2037 and H.R. 2281) passed by the Senate and approved by the House Judiciary Committee make it a crime to "circumvent" any "technological protection measure" (such as encryption or password protection) used by the copyright owner to bar access to its product. The broad new right to control access to information that the bill creates would not be limited by fair use, or any other current law exception to copyright owners' rights. This unprecedented new right would be the only unlimited right in all of copyright law! It could make impossible the exercise of existing user privileges such as fair use (the ability to quote an excerpt, to copy an excerpt for personal use, to use copyrighted materials in the classroom and in other limited ways without owner permission or payment). Action on H.R. 2281 is now occurring in the House Commerce Committee; their recent hearing and meetings have focused on the bill's impact on fair use. The final outcome is still uncertain, but it will set crucial rules of the road for the information superhighway for the first few decades of the next millennium. (3) INTERNET CONTENT: RESPECT LOCAL DECISION-MAKING -- On June 23 the House Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee, with jurisdiction over library and education funding, voted 15-0 to approve an amendment by Rep. Ernest Istook, Jr. (R-OK) that would require public schools and libraries to install software to protect children from obscenity, as a condition of receiving federal funds from any federal agency for the acquisition or operation of computers accessible to minors and with access to the Internet. LSTA, most K-12 education programs, and many other federal program funds would be conditioned on this requirement. S. 1619, a bill sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and a similar bill (H.R. 3177) by Rep. Bob Franks (R-NJ), would require libraries and schools that receive e-rate telecommunications discounts to install filtering software. Alternative language has been proposed by Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) and others to require local Internet use policies rather than blocking or filtering software. This substitute would be consistent with the need to have all such content and curriculum decisions made at the local level. _________________________________________________________________ ALAWON is a free, irregular publication of the American Library Association Washington Office. To subscribe, send the message: subscribe ala-wo [your_firstname] [your_lastname] to listproc @ala.org. To unsubscribe, send the message: unsubscribe ala-wo to listproc@ala.org. ALAWON archives at http://www.ala.org/ washoff/alawon. Visit our Web site at http://www.alawash.org. ALA Washington Office 202.628.8410 (V) 1301 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, #403 202.628.8419 (F) Washington, DC 20004-1701 800.941.8478 (V) Lynne E. Bradley, Editor Deirdre Herman, Managing Editor Contributors: Carol C. Henderson Claudette Tennant All materials subject to copyright by the American Library Association may be reprinted or redistributed for noncommercial purposes with appropriate credits. =================================================================