ALAWON: American Library Association Washington Office Newsline Volume 9, Number 84 October 20, 2000 In this issue: COPA Releases Report on Findings Recommendations from the Commission on Online Child Protection (COPA) study on protecting children from harmful material on the Internet were released to Congress today along with a report of the Commission's findings. COPA was formed in 1998 as part of the Child Online Protection Act to study methods that would help reduce access by minors to "harmful" Internet material. The commission studied available methods and technologies used to protect children from inappropriate Internet content, including, among others: filtering and blocking software, labeling and rating systems, acceptable use policies and family contracts. The Commission's findings support broadly available education rather than mandatory filters. The report reads, "no technology or method provides a perfect solution, but when used in conjunction with education, acceptable use policies and adult supervision, many technologies can provide improved safety from inadvertent access from harmful to minors materials." Instead of recommending the mandated use of filtering software, the Commission holds that a "combination of public education, consumer empowerment technologies and methods, increased enforcement of existing laws, and industry action" are needed to address the issue of protecting children from inappropriate Internet content. Following are the Commission's Recommendations. The full text of the report is available and downloadable at: http://www.copacommission.org/report/. 1) Government and the private sector should undertake a major education campaign to promote public awareness of technologies and methods available to protect children online. 2) Government and industry should effectively promote acceptable use policies. 3) The Commission recommends allocation of resources for the independent evaluation of child protection technologies and to provide reports to the public about the capabilities of these technologies. 4) The commission recommends that industry take steps to improve child protection mechanisms, and make them more accessible online. 5) The Commission encourages a broad, national, private sector conversation on the development of next-generation systems for labeling, rating, and identifying content reflecting the convergence of old and new media. 6) Government should encourage the use of technology in efforts to make children's experience of the internet safe and useful. 7) Government at all levels should fund, with significant new money, aggressive programs to investigate, prosecute, and report violations of federal and state obscenity laws, including efforts that emphasize the protection of children from accessing materials illegal under current state and federal obscenity law. 8) The Commission recommends that state and federal law enforcement make available a list, without images, of Usenet newsgroups, IP addresses, World Wide Web sites or other Internet sources that have been found to contain child pornography or where convictions have been obtained involving obscene material. 9) The Commission recommends that the Federal agencies, pursuant to further Congressional rulemaking authority as needed, consider greater enforcement and possibly rulemaking to discourage deceptive or unfair practices that entice children to view obscene materials, including the practices of "mouse-trapping" and deceptive meta-tagging. 10) Government should provide new money to address international aspects of Internet crime, including obscenity and child pornography. 11) The Commission urges the ISP industry to voluntarily undertake "best practices" to protect minors. 12) The Online Commercial Adult Industry should voluntarily take steps to restrict minors' ready access to adult content. Action Needed: Filtering provisions still exist as riders on the Labor-HHS- Education Appropriations bill. It is imperative that library supporters contact their legislators to alert them to the prominence of education and consumer empowerment in COPA's findings. Urge your legislator to heed the wisdom of the ideologically diverse Commission members whom Congress itself appointed to examine this issue. The Capitol Switchboard number is: 202.224.3121. ****** ALAWON (ISSN 1069-7799) is a free, irregular publication of the American Library Association Washington Office. All materials subject to copyright by the American Library Association may be reprinted or redistributed for noncommercial purposes with appropriate credits. To subscribe to ALAWON, send the message: subscribe ala-wo [your_firstname] [your_lastname] to listproc@ala.org or go to http://www.ala.org/washoff/alawon. To unsubscribe to ALAWON, send the message: unsubscribe ala-wo to listproc@ala.org. ALAWON archives at http://www.ala.org/washoff/alawon. ALA Washington Office, 1301 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Suite 403, Washington, D.C. 20004-1701; phone: 202.628.8410 or 800.941.8478 toll-free; fax: 202.628.8419; e-mail: alawash@alawash.org; Web site: http://www.ala.org/washoff. Executive Director: Emily Sheketoff. Office of Government Relations: Lynne Bradley, Director; Mary Costabile, Peter Kaplan, Miriam Nisbet and Claudette Tennant. Office for Information Technology Policy: Rick Weingarten, Director; Jennifer Hendrix, Carrie Russell and Saundra Shirley. ALAWON Editor: Bernadette Murphy.