Freedom of Expression and Cyberspace -- the Legal Question


This discussion developed out of a mailing on America Online's "Terms of
Service," compiled by Stephen Williamson, one of the variegators of the
Motley Focus Locus, and sent to the editors of a number of E-zines and
organizations interested in freedom of expression. To see the original
thread, click here:

Freedom of Expression and America Online


Date: Tue, 16 Jan 1996 20:15:48 -0500 (EST)
From: steven cherry <stc@panix.com>
To: "Stephen A.Williamson" <stephenw@escape.com>

Thanks for sending this, but I have to confess that even before getting
down to Foster Johnson's remarks, I was mentally forming a reply that
was substantially the same as his.

If you think AOL violated the terms of service, take it up with them,
directly, or in court. If you just want uncensored speech, get out onto
the Internet, where it (currently) can be found.

If you want to stay on AOL and make it a better place, do exactly what
you are doing within the confines of AOL, but don't expect to find much
support out here in the great wide world, because it looks to be a
rather parochial issue on what from our perspective is one large but
insignificant provider.

By the way, the idea that AOL is a mall with public space protected by
the first amendment is interesting, but not compelling. Malls and
airports enjoy public concessions, zoning variances, tax breaks, and the
like. I see nothing like that in AOL's case.

-steven-


Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 00:43:07 -0400
To: steven cherry <stc@panix.com>
From: stephenw@escape.com (Stephen A.Williamson)
Cc: dwaink@iquest.net, timber@silcom.com

>Thanks for sending this, but I have to confess that even before getting
>down to Foster Johnson's remarks, I was mentally forming a reply that
>was substantially the same as his. If you think AOL violated the terms
>of service, take it up with them, directly, or in court. If you just
>want uncensored speech, get out onto the Internet, where it (currently)
>can be found.

They have, if you read the documents -- a hard slog, I know! It appears
to us they tried to avoid going public and have done so as a last
resort. Some have stayed on aol, others have left in protest. It's
breaking up the little community of writers who shared their work there
either way.

>If you want to stay on AOL and make it a better place, do exactly what
>you are doing within the confines of AOL, but don't expect to find much
>support out here in the great wide world, because it looks to be a
>rather parochial issue on what from our perspective is one large but
>insignificant provider.

Fail to see why an organization interested in free expression wouldn't
support CCA -- whether they thought them parochial or not. Most
struggles start parochial -- one woman doesn't want to move to the back
of one bus. "We're not going to pay tax on tea" -- parochial. Why
should their struggle remain only within the confines of AOL, and not
seek outside support? What's the logic to that? What's the logic in
withholding support?

We think that out on the Internet folks are overconfident, miss that
practical point, that if an organization the size of AOL can be bent, so
can little three man direct-connects. Why not engage this sort of
foolish censorship wherever it is? The Motley Focus is on the net, not
AOL, we never even considered doing anything there. But other folks had
other ideas. Why not struggle against censorship there, rather than wait
for them come out "here."

>By the way, the idea that AOL is a mall with public space protected by
>the first amendment is interesting, but not compelling. Malls and
>airports enjoy public concessions, zoning variances, tax breaks, and
>the like. I see nothing like that in AOL's case.

I have a coal mine. I recruit workers. They live on my property, form
a community. I get to set the rules, change them unilaterally? They
don't like it they have to leave, it's cut and dried? Was it?

Can I tell them which church to go to? Fire them for bad language they
use off the job? Throw them out of their home and job if they protest
that they don't like the conditions? This has been fought out on
another turning of the spiral once before, if not many times before.

It seems to us public and constitutional rights, at least in some cases
(large organizations, segmental space-four letter word area are utterly
and easily avoidable-their proposal) should be extended into private
space, when such an organization has created the conditions of public
space or area in order to attract participants. Mouthful eh, but anyway.

Case went to Supreme Court. Reagan shot. Woman said, "I hope they get
him next time." Public employee. They fired her. Supreme Court ruled in
her favor -- she doesn't have give up the right to free speech, even a
poor use of free speech, to have her job. Could a private employer fired
her for that reason? Not and said so anyway.

I'll forward your letter on to CCA so they'll see what they are up
against, but I have to think that the attitude you express, the lack of
sympathy, is going to be mutual -- you build walls this way rather than
bridges.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

My Best Wishes, Stephen Williamson


Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 10:46:58 -0400
To: stephenw@escape.com
From: steven cherry <stc@panix.com>

On Wed, 17 Jan 1996, Stephen A.Williamson wrote:

>Fail to see why an organization interested in free expression wouldn't
>support CCA -- whether they thought them parochial or not. Most
>struggles

Speaking for ourselves, we have limited resources and a very specific
charter, which is available at our web site. Hypothesizing for others,
as I did, I can't do much more than reiterate what I said (at least
until you reply specifically to it) -- AOL may look like a big important
place to you, but it looks like just another ISP, and not a very good
one, to many others.

>start parochial -- one woman doesn't want to move to the back of one
>bus. "We're not going to pay tax on tea"-- parochial. Why should their
>struggle remain only within the confines of AOL, and not seek outside
>support? What's the logic to that? What's the logic in withholding
>support?

The comparison with Rosa Parks is unwarranted. This isn't
discrimination, it's a choice by AOL of what kind of content they want
on their system. Look at it the other way: shouldn't AOL have the right
to determine what kind of system they want to offer? And if AOL made
certain representations to the poets and then didn't live up to them,
that's a TOS dispute, not one of censorship.

Look, my favorite vegetarian resturant starts serving meat and stops
making that vegan lasagna that was their specialty. Tragic for me, yes.
Parochial, not discriminatory (in a legal sense) and well within their
rights. Suppose that restaurant was the McDonalds chain (giving it the
size and reach of AOL). Still seems like tough luck to me.

>I have a coal mine. I recruit workers. They live on my property, form a
>community. I get to set the rules, change them unilaterally? They don't
>like it they have to leave, it's cut and dried? Was it? Can I tell them
>which church to go to? Fire them for bad language they use off the job?
>Throw them out of their home and job if they protest they don't like
>the conditions? This has been fought out on another turning of the
>spiral, once before, if not many times before.

Once again you ignore the details of the earlier reply. If we're talking
about a private endeavor, not using publicly supported schools, sewers,
power lines, etc., then why not? If I go live with the Quakers, I think
I expect I'll have to live by their rules.

Don't forget that some of the rules concerning company towns regard the
uniqueness of the resource (the land itself). I don't see anything like
that in AOL's case.

>It seems to us that public and constitutional rights, at least in some
>cases (large organizations, segmental space-four letter word area are
>utterly and easily avoidable-their proposal) should be extended into
>private space, when such an organization has created the conditions of
>public space or area in order to attract participants. Mouthful eh, but
>anyway. Case went to Supreme Court. Reagan shot. Woman said, "I hope
>they get him next time." Public employee. They fired her. Supreme Court
>ruled in her favor -- she doesn't have give up the right to free
>speech, even a poor use of free speech to have her job. Could a private
>employer fired her for that reason? Not and said so anyway.

Employee/employer relations and free-speech are another matter entirely.
I'm not sure I understand your last remark in this paragraph. Private
employers certainly do have *some* rights regarding the on-the-job
speech of employees, for example when that speech directly affects a
company's image, or proprietary information (trade secrets, etc), and so
on. The rights of America's public employers (goverments) is a somewhat
different matter.

Look, if you really thought what AOL was unconstitutional, you'd be
working on a court case, right? So clearly you don't think there's a
legal case, so why are you hiding behind constitutionality examples?

If you want to boycott AOL because they suck and backstabbed some worthy
poets, hell, I'll stay off AOL and make it a point to tell my friends to
do so as well. But if you want VTW to support a boycott, that's beyond
what we do.

You have to make up your mind -- do you think what AOL did was illegal,
or just bad for their poets and customers? And if the latter, isn't it
their right to make some bad decisions?

-steven-


From: Ismahan@aol.com
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 13:18:45 -0500
To: stc@panix.com
cc: dwaink@iquest.net, stephenw@escape.com, timber@silcom.com,
shabbir@vtw.org, Enuftalk@aol.com, SaigeFawn@aol.com,
Astralan@aol.com
Subject: AOL and Creative Coalition on AOL

Hello Steven,

I was forwarded your dialogue with Stephen on our behalf and thought I
should address a few points you had made, perhaps clarify to you our
position, AOL's Terms of Service and possible legal action.

CCA is only 2 months old. We are just getting organized. We have held
back on launching any kind of a legal attack in the hopes that AOL would
respond in a favorable manner to our requests for a "Free" speech area
as regards to posting literary works. We have done this specifically
because many of the members of our group like the ease of use of the AOL
interface and have no desire to become computer techies in order to find
their way around the DOS-like world of the internet.

We have not at any time decided against fighting a law suit or
eliminated that as a final course of action.

We do believe that cyberspace is a "resource", just like land is. We
believe that AOL has carved out a piece of this resource which belongs
to the public and it has decided that it is God within it's "own" space.
Let us be clear on this. AOL does not own the space, AOL owns nothing
more than the machinery used to access the space. Our legal contention
is that if we mess with their machinery they have private business
rights to object to that. The space they access is ours, not theirs. Our
contention is that cyberspace belongs to everyone as do radio waves, tv
transmission, the air we breathe, etc.

We also contend that AOL is practicing blatant discrimination amongst
its members that has nothing to do with anything enforcable within its
Terms of Service contract. There is nowhere in the TOS contract where
members are told "if you are poets, TOS will be enforced 10 times more
rigorously than if you spend all your time in the chat rooms." We
believe this discrimination is illegal, that it goes directly to issues
of slander and public debasement of the character of the people posting
the items in contention, and that there may well be half a dozen legal
avenues of legal attack which could result in a "liberal judge" like
Miles Lord of Minnesota issuing a "Cease and Desist" order to AOL.

The biggest legal issue here is whether or not, once again, the Congress
of the United States and the courts are going to allow private business
to take a public resource, cyberspace itself, away from the people and
give it to private industry, or business interest. Personally, our legal
philosophy is that it is time for that to stop happening. This place,
and this resource is so vast, and so far reaching in its potential, that
we feel now is the time to fight.

So we have not really begun our fight. We are merely in the preparation
stages and are hoping to make AOL back down on this TOS issue for the
comfort of the poets posting there. If we can do that we have
established some credibility with our group, we'll have a base of people
with excellent language skills capable of carrying the fight to the
Congress and the Courts on more substantive issues.

If you have any further questions about CCA, or would like to join,
please feel free to write to me at email address "Proctor20@aol.com" OR
"Ismahan@aol.com".

Thank you, isa.


Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 13:46:14 -0500 (EST)
From: steven cherry <stc@panix.com>
To: Ismahan@aol.com
cc: dwaink@iquest.net, stephenw@escape.com,
timber@silcom.com, shabbir@vtw.org,
Enuftalk@aol.com, SaigeFawn@aol.com, Astralan@aol.com
Subject: Re: AOL and Creative Coalition on AOL

On Thu, 18 Jan 1996 ismahan@aol.com wrote:

>Hello Steven,
>
>I was forwarded your dialogue with Stephen on our behalf and thought I
>should address a few points you had made, perhaps clarify to you our
>position, AOL's Terms of Service and possible legal action. CCA is only
>2 months old. We are just getting organized. We have held back on
>launching any kind of a legal attack in the hopes that AOL would
>respond in a favorable manner to our requests for a "Free" speech area
>as regards to posting literary works. We have done this specifically
>because many of the members of our group like the ease of use of the
>AOL interface and have no desire to become computer techies in order to
>find their way around the DOS-like world of the internet.

The Internet isn't at all DOS-like for the millions of Macintosh and
Windows users. There's also a little start-up named Netscape that has
been working on this problem for a while, with some success.

>We do believe that cyberspace is a "resource", just like land is.

No, see, cyberspace is a resource just unlike land. It is entirely
geography-independent, unlike most things. Land is a particularly good
example of something that is geography-dependent. Cyberspace is
infinitely expandable, other than time, nothing is less expandable than
land. The objects in cyberspace are infinitely reproducible at almost no
cost, entirely unlike the objects in "landspace."

There is probably nothing less like land than cyberspace, and probably
the reverse is the case as well.

It is these very differences that were at the heart of my earlier reply.

>We believe that AOL has carved out a piece of this resource which
>belongs to the public and it has decided that it is God within it's
>"own" space. Let us be clear on this. AOL does not own the space, AOL
>owns nothing more than the machinery used to access the space. Our
>legal contention is that if we mess with their machinery they have
>private business rights to object to that. The space they access is
>ours, not theirs. Our contention is that cyberspace belongs everyone as
>do radio waves, tv transmission, the air we breathe, etc.

How can the local AOL area exist without there being a physical
correlate on the AOL servers? I'll make a deal with you. You can take
what might be thought to be part of my physical body, namely the space
between the atoms that compose my internal organs, and do whatever you
want with it, including rent it out for billboards. But, you can't touch
the surrounding tissue in any way. I'll give you this "space" for
$1/year, a very reasonable cost, don't you think? If you agree, I'll
send you an account number and you can do a wire transfer. The name on
the account will be "Brooklyn Bridge."

>We also contend that AOL is practicing blatant discrimination amongst
>its members that has nothing to do with anything enforcable within its
>Terms of Service contract. There is nowhere in the TOS contract where
>members are told "if you are poets, TOS will be enforced 10 times more
>rigorously than if you spend all your time in the chat rooms." We
>believe this discrimination is illegal, that it goes directly to issues
>of slander and public debasement of the character of the people posting
>the items in contention, and that there may well be half a dozen legal
>avenues of legal attack which could result in a "liberal judge" like
>Miles Lord of Minnesota issuing a "Cease and Desist" order to AOL.

As I said before, if you think you have a legal case, go for it. I note
that the case isn't a free speech case. Court cases of any sort are
outside the charter of Voters Telecomm Watch, which you'll note begins
with the word "Voters," not "Jurists" or the like.

>The biggest legal issue here is whether or not, once again, the
>Congress of the United States and the courts are going to allow
>private business to take a public resource, cyberspace itself, away
>from the people and give it to private industry, or business interest.
>Personally, our legal philosophy is that it is time for that to stop
>happening. This place, and this resource is so vast, and so far
>reaching in its potential, that we feel now is the time to fight.

I'm glad you feel the vastness of cyberspace. Now if you could only
notice that AOL is just one small corner of it, we'd be on the way to
begin to address some of the issues and arguments I raised in my earlier
message. Until that's done, all I can do is repeat what I said there,
which seems rather pointless in light of the infinite reproducibility of
the objects in cybersp-- oh, never mind.

-steven-

(Repeat after me: AOL is not the Internet
AOL is not the Internet
AOL is not the Internet
... )


Date: Sat, 20 Jan 1996 17:16:41 -0400
To: stc@panix.com, Ismahan@aol.com
From: stephenw@escape.com (Stephen A.Williamson)
Subject: AOL Banned Poetry:Legality
Cc: timber@silcom.com, shabbir@vtw.org, Enuftalk@aol.com,
SaigeFawn@aol.com, Astralan@aol.com,
indexoncenso@gn.apc.org

SAW:

I forwarded Steven Cherry's letter to isa because I thought CCA should
see unsympathetic responses as well as letters of support. I wanted to
express our perspective at AfterNoon, but I also wanted to do justice to
the complex legal concepts involved in any argument about freedom of
expression. I'm glad to see the two of you engaged in this debate.
Here's an excerpt from a letter by Adam Newey of the "Index on
Censorship" which I think expresses the right context for the debate.
AfterNoon support for CCA is not dependent on legal arguments, but our
sense that this struggle is, however small in scale, for free
expression.

Adam Newey:

I do think that this sort of practice (AOL's)amounts to a form of
censorship. I do entirely take the point made by Luigi-Bob Drake, that
there are more serious and severe censorship practices going on in many
parts of the world - Ken Saro-Wiwa is, sadly, but one of many. However,
I also think it's rather important not to backtrack on matters of
principle: you are far more aware than I of the larger political
background in the USA right now with regard to on-line regulation. And
I'm sure that there is a good argument to made about leaving the big
political battles to those with the clout to win them. But that's no
reason to let aol off the hook: they should be told how their
subscribers feel about their practices. The points you made in your
letter to Doug Lawson (8 January) were very telling in this respect. The
right to freedom of expression is not just an abstract political entity,
a part of the grand contract between government and governed. It's also
more fundamental even than that - it speaks to an essential human need,
to express one's self, to be heard (and not simply to be heard as a
participant in the political process), and to be respected as an equal
member of the community.

isa:

Hello Steven,

I was forwarded your dialogue with Stephen on our behalf and thought I
should address a few points you had made, perhaps clarify to you our
position, AOL's Terms of Service and possible legal action.

CCA is only 2 months old. We are just getting organized. We have held
back on launching any kind of a legal attack in the hopes that AOL would
respond in a favorable manner to our requests for a "Free" speech area
as regards to posting literary works. We have done this specifically
because many of the members of our group like the ease of use of the AOL
interface and have no desire to become computer techies in order to find
their way around the DOS-like world of the internet.

steven:

The Internet isn't at all DOS-like for the millions of Macintosh and
Windows users. There's also a little start-up named Netscape that has
been working on this problem for a while, with some success.

SAW:

Steven is right about the facts, but there are millions of people who
want to be in cyberspace with as little technical hassle as possible;
that is what they want! And AOL has contributed, like the other large
services, to making that possible, but also in convincing people that
life on the net outside the big services is impossibly complicated. I
just looked at the writers' area. There is a lot good information there,
particularly for beginning writers -- although over-produced and over-
touted for what it is, it's easy to get at. I can see how some writers
would be attracted there.

isa:

We do believe that cyberspace is a "resource", just like land is.

steven:

No, see, cyberspace is a resource just unlike land.

SAW:

I think that isa is saying that cyberspace is a resource in the same way
that land is a resource, not that it is a "land-like" resource, although
in some ways, of course, it is. The analogy comes easily; we talk about
"cyberspace," "sites," "going out" on the net (even browsing implies a
special analogy.) It's a metaphor -- certainly cyberspace is not
*literally* land. If it were land they'd be no need for a metaphor at
all. "My love is like a rose," but also, "A rose is a rose is a rose."

steven:

It is entirely geography-independent, unlike most things. Land is a
particularly good example of something that is geography-dependent.
Cyberspace is infinitely expandable, other than time, nothing is less
expandable than land. The objects in cyberspace are infinitely
reproducible at almost no cost, entirely unlike the objects in
"landspace."

SAW:

They just discovered another 50 billion galaxies with the Hubble
telescope, so if you can't say land is infinitely expandable, it is
apparently infinitely expanding! Or in any case, there is,
*technically,* an almost infinite amount of land. We just can't get at
it! For practical purposes it doesn't exist -- like much of cyberspace.
Unless we have the means to gain access to it, how much there is doesn't
matter.

I think isa means that it is not quantity, but access and distribution
that defines scarcity. All scarcities are local. If you happen to be the
local in question -- hard cheese.

steven:

There is probably nothing less like land than cyberspace, and probably
the reverse is the case as well.

SAW:

Cyberspace is not physical space, but there *are* similarities. Deny it
if you will, but everyone feels and uses the analogy in practice. The
analogy to space serves to make the point more clearly than an analogy
to land, I think, but neither is as far-fetched *qua metaphor* as you
assert.

steven:

It is these very differences that were at the heart of my earlier reply.

SAW:

Speaking for AfterNoon's position, none of this is directly relevant to
the main point of our argument. Interesting, but not relevant.

isa:

We believe that AOL has carved out a piece of this resource which
belongs to the public and it has decided that it is God within its "own"
space. Let us be clear on this. AOL does not own the space, AOL owns
nothing more than the machinery used to access the space. Our legal
contention is that if we mess with their machinery they have private
business rights to object to that. The space they access is ours, not
theirs. Our contention is that cyberspace belongs to everyone as do
radio waves, TV transmission, the air we breathe, etc.

steven:

How can the local AOL area exist without there being a physical
correlate on the AOL servers? I'll make a deal with you. You can take
what might be thought to be part of my physical body, namely the space
between the atoms that compose my internal organs, and do whatever you
want with it, including rent it out for billboards. But, you can't touch
the surrounding tissue in any way. I'll give you this "space" for
$1/year, a very reasonable cost, don't you think? If you agree, I'll
send you an account number and you can do a wire transfer. The name on
the account will be "Brooklyn Bridge."

SAW:

Our position at AfterNoon is somewhat different. We use the analogy of
"public space" as a way of expressing what we believe to be the public
and constitutional interest in combatting new constraints on free
expression. Our argument, like all argument and analogies, is to be
held loosely, not seized in a literalist deathgrip. *Only* a rose is a
rose is rose, or, as somebody once said, "The rest is metaphor." It's
whimsical for us to make a legal argument in an era of specialization;
we're doing it anyway.

isa:

We also contend that AOL is practicing blatant discrimination amongst
its members that has nothing to do with anything enforceable within its
Terms of Service contract. There is nowhere in the TOS contract where
members are told "if you are poets, TOS will be enforced 10 times more
rigorously than if you spend all your time in the chat rooms." We
believe this discrimination is illegal, that it goes directly to issues
of slander and public debasement of the character of the people posting
the items in contention, and that there may well be half a dozen legal
avenues of legal attack which could result in a "liberal judge" like
Miles Lord of Minnesota issuing a "Cease and Desisit" order to AOL.

SAW:

The more I've looked to the more I'd agree that AOL is applying its
TOSes in an erratic and discriminatory way. It's hard to be a consistent
censor! AOL isn't applying the same rules to chat lines as to the
writers' groups (it's too expensive, I suspect.) They apply the rules to
a poetry area to make a show for their right wing critics.

I've only been on an AOL chat line once, but what I heard was "fuck"
said every other sentence. I'm not saying there isn't a good case for
cleaning up the language. Four letter words *are* getting substituted
for content, but that's another issue.

steven:

As I said before, if you think you have a legal case, go for it. I note
that the case isn't a free speech case. Court cases of any sort are
outside the charter of Voters Telecomm Watch, which you'll note begins
with the word "Voters," not "Jurists" or the like.

Steven also said in his last letter, which I'm afraid I haven't had time
to reply to yet:

Look, my favorite vegetarian restaurant starts serving meat and stops
making that vegan lasagna that was their specialty. Tragic for me, yes.
Parochial, not discriminatory (in a legal sense) and well within their
rights. Suppose that restaurant was the McDonalds chain (giving it the
size and reach of AOL). Still seems like tough luck to me.

SAW:

But the constitutional protection extends into the restaurant's
private space does it not? And hosts of laws intrude on owners' rights.
They can't discriminate. The health department gets to check for
roaches, the IRS to check the books. The bar must be licensed. They
can't continue to advertise they are vegans and serve cheeseburgers,
Consumer Affairs will bent out of shape. They can't short change
people. Beat up on patrons they don't like. The building department is
supposed to make sure their building won't fall down. The owners'
rights are not absolute in deciding what their restaurant is going to be
like. There is a public interest, constitutional and legal, in extending
protection for customers in a public restaurant. Even if they were a
private club some of this would extend to them.

But we're talking about free expression (for AfterNoon this makes it a
different situation, but that that's our perspective), not lasagna. Can
they throw me out of that restaurant because I like President Clinton
and I say so?

Can a restaurant serving the public ban Democrats from eating there?
Maybe it's just market forces that keep them from doing so, but I
wonder. As Dwain Kitchel pointed out to me, they say they are "America
Online" and yet they are not inclusive, not allowing *America* to be on
line. Say something they don't like and you'll find yourself in
"America Off Line" quick, or your words censored.

Again, AfterNoon would like stimulate a legal investigation of whether
the constitutional protection of free speech extends to the public
posting areas of a few dominant providers, providers who have invited
"individuals" (not asked for submissions) into areas that feel like
public spaces, where people are encouraged to post on elaborate bulletin
boards, censored because of the content of their postings, and then told
that they can't have a specially-partitioned free speech area. As far
as I know, AOL gave no reason for this refusal. Isa can correct me.

steven:

I'm glad you feel the vastness of cyberspace. Now if you could only
notice that AOL is just one small corner of it, we'd be on the way to
begin to address some of the issues and arguments I raised in my earlier
message. Until that's done, all I can do is repeat what I said there,
which seems rather pointless in light of the infinite reproducibility of
the objects in cybersp-- oh, never mind.

SAW:

Again, reproducibility is only indirectly connected to the argument, if
at all. Scarcity is an issue, the scarcity which is a reflection of
accessibility (all that land in the Andromeda galaxy, for example.) But
even that's a small part not the *whole* issue. Neither side of the
argument makes sense on the basis of scarcity alone; fair access,
accessibility, and much much else is involved.

Anyway, this isn't really relevant to AfterNoon's proposed legal
argument, that a public and constitutional interest in free expression
extends into privately-owned cyber"space" under certain special
circumstances. To define them is complex, but the "functioning area of
free public discourse" can't be reduced overall by law, even commercial
law. In terms of free expression there is a public interest in not only
*possibility* of free expression, but in the existence of a "space" in
which it takes place. Look, free expression must take place "somewhere,"
and that overall "somewhere" must be protected as well as the right to
speak there. Turn Hyde Park into a private parking lot or a mall, and
you've decreased the ability to speak freely. We're concerned about a
large-scale and general process of that happening as cyberspace becomes
more and more central to public discourse.

We believe that refusing to set new precedents in this new conflict
between the rights of property and of free expression -- particularly in
the fragmented, technology-based culture which America has become --
will significantly reduce the people's access to free speech. We also
argue that, in AOL's case, at least, the provision of free speech areas
can easily -- and inexpensively -- be accomplished. Children can easily
be kept out, and nobody need be forced to read or see things which might
offend them. There is simply no need to restrict free speech in this
situation :) Whew. Let's go have a beer at Steven's vegan restaurant.

More to the point, Steven and isa, can we put these exchanges of letters
up on our Open Committee of Political Correspondence? These exchanges
are becoming more general than the AOL controversy itself. People might
be interested in the larger context and take this core discussion off in
different directions. If you both agree, I'd like to start back with
Steven's first letter.... And I'd like to send this slice of correspondence
to those who've expressed an interest in this dispute, to show them what
a piece of it looks like.

My Best Wishes, Stephen Williamson


Date: Sat, 20 Jan 1996 22:48:41 -0400
To: steven cherry <stc@panix.com>
From: stephenw@escape.com (Stephen A.Williamson)
Subject: Re: AOL Banned Poetry:Legality
Cc: timber@silcom.com

You certainly have my permission to reproduce my letters in this
exchange.

-steven-


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