Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report (Second edition; fully revised and updated)

No sooner was the Internet upon us than anxiety arose over the ease of accessing pornography and other controversial content. In response, entrepreneurs soon developed filtering products. By the end of the decade, a new industry had emerged to create and market Internet filters....Yet filters were highly imprecise from the beginning. The sheer size of the Internet meant that identifying potentially offensive content had to be done mechanically, by matching "key" words and phrases; hence, the blocking of Web sites for "Middlesex County," or words such as "magna cum laude". Internet filters are crude and error-prone because they categorize expression without regard to its context, meaning, and value. Yet these sweeping censorship tools are now widely used in companies, homes, schools, and libraries. Internet filters remain a pressing public policy issue to all those concerned about free expression, education, culture, and democracy. This fully revised and updated report surveys tests and studies of Internet filtering products from the mid-1990s through 2006. It provides an essential resource for the ongoing debate

eXplicit Content: A Discussion of the MPAA Film Rating System and the NC-17 Rating

The United States film industry is controlled by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its six signatories--the major productions studios (Sony, Warner Brothers, Universal, Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, Time Warner), and through this joint-partnership they have monopolized prime production, distribution, exhibition and classification of the U.S film market. The objective of this project is to shed light on biases present in the MPAA rating system\u27s treatment of sex and violence under the X/NC-17 rating in order to demonstrate the lack of viability of the system in today\u27s world

Extra Financial Analysis – EFA: Environmental and financial performances of ABB, Akzo-Nobel and SCA: Picturing the business opportunities and risks associated to stakeholder perceptions and environmental and social prerequisites

External assessment of companies’ environmental aspects often focus on the existence of strategies, commitments, management systems and reporting of firms that concerns environmental aspects. Instead, in line with extra financial analysis, in order to play a role in decision-making, analysis of environmental aspects should incorporate the influence that stakeholders may have on future revenues of the assessed firm and how well advanced corporate strategies are in meeting these threats, turning them into business opportunities. Thereafter, the environmental information financial analysts’ use in their financial analyst reports as well as the relation between environmental and financial performance are illuminated. Three industry sectors, Chemicals, Electrical Equipment and Paper & Forest Products, are specially analysed in this report. Out of almost 4500 analyst reports about 36 percent contain environmental information, but when looking at industry sectors these numbers range from only 3 to up to 79 percent. The type of environmental information that the analysts focus on in their reports are on how firms’ products and product portfolios are adopted to Environmental regulations facing customers/markets, Customer demands and Eco-Efficiency. This product perspective is strongly related to discussions of business opportunities of the firm. In fact, a good 77 % of the financial analyst reports containing environmental information dealt with opportunities linked to environmental aspects. To a lower extent, financial analysts write about company specific risk issues like emissions and litigations while their reports is virtually absent from aspects like environmental strategies, policies, management systems, reporting and auditing. The correlation between corporate financial and environmental performances is illuminated through regression analyses. Industry environmental risk is found to be negatively correlated to corporate return on assets – ROA – (in an static model) while (when applying a dynamic model) corporate environmental performance and ROA have a positive correlation in the short term, which can find support by other studies using different data.Extra financial analysis; EFA; Financial analyst reports; Content analysis; ESG Framework; Return on assets; ROA; Environmental performance; Social performance; financial performance; Financial accounting; Non-financial information

First Amendment Beefs : Agricultural Checkoff Programs and Freedom of Speech

In the past fourteen years, the Supreme Court has ruled three separate times on the constitutionality of Federal Farm Promotion Programs under the First Amendment. The challenge has been that the programs, which fund generic advertisements such as “Got Milk?” and “Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner,” compel the subsidization of objectionable speech from private producers. The answers handed down from the Court have been conflicting, but each has contributed to the new, still-emerging “government speech doctrine.” In the most recent case, Johanns v. Livestock Marketing Association (2005), the Court ruled that the speech in question was completely governmental and therefore could receive no protection against the compelled subsidization of it. This research project seeks to explore the history of checkoff programs and the legal case history that led the Court to reach this conclusion. Furthermore, this paper asserts that the speech in question is not being classified in the proper way to afford it the scrutiny it deserves. First, the Court treats this speech as government speech when it is at least partially private. Second, the Court treats the speech as commercial speech when it is at least partly political. The findings that misclassifications are shaping the emerging government speech doctrine are concerning. The Court repeatedly fails to acknowledge that speech relating to the production of food is inherently political and thus deserves heightened scrutiny

Social Media Accountability for Terrorist Propaganda

Terrorist organizations have found social media websites to be invaluable for disseminating ideology, recruiting terrorists, and planning operations. National and international leaders have repeatedly pointed out the dangers terrorists pose to ordinary people and state institutions. In the United States, the federal Communications Decency Act’s § 230 provides social networking websites with immunity against civil law suits. Litigants have therefore been unsuccessful in obtaining redress against internet companies who host or disseminate third-party terrorist content. This Article demonstrates that § 230 does not bar private parties from recovery if they can prove that a social media company had received complaints about specific webpages, videos, posts, articles, IP addresses, or accounts of foreign terrorist organizations; the company’s failure to remove the material; a terrorist’s subsequent viewing of or interacting with the material on the website; and that terrorist’s acting upon the propaganda to harm the plaintiff. This Article argues that irrespective of civil immunity, the First Amendment does not limit Congress’s authority to impose criminal liability on those content intermediaries who have been notified that their websites are hosting third-party foreign terrorist incitement, recruitment, or instruction. Neither the First Amendment nor the Communications Decency Act prevents this form of federal criminal prosecution. A social media company can be prosecuted for material support of terrorism if it is knowingly providing a platform to organizations or individuals who advocate the commission of terrorist acts. Mechanisms will also need to be created that can enable administrators to take emergency measures, while simultaneously preserving the due process rights of internet intermediaries to challenge orders to immediately block, temporarily remove, or permanently destroy data

REGULATION OF THE INTERACTIVE DIGITAL MEDIA INDUSTRY IN SINGAPORE

The latest “buzz” in Singapore is interactive digital media (IDM), a diverse industry that includes technologies such as video games and interactive advertisements. In January this year, the Singapore government announced that it would target the IDM sector as one of the key growth areas for the future, and provide the infrastructure for Singapore to be educated in and exposed to this new technology.1 The Singapore government has openly committed to setting aside S$500 million over the next five years to develop this industry.2 And to deal with the social, technical, legal and regulatory implications of this industry, on 1 April 2007, the Singapore government also set up a high level advisory council which will make recommendations to the government on how these issues will be managed while keeping pace with the development of this industry in Singapore.3 While the Advisory Council on the Impact of New Media on Society4 studies and deliberates on the issues, the existing legal and regulatory framework that continues to apply to new media has been described as based on a “light touch” approach. This paper seeks to summarise the existing position in Singapore, and tries to describe the policies and philosophies behind the “light touch” approach as elucidated from the laws and regulations in Singapore