CIPA

I hope that every one of my readers also visits Jenny Levine’s Shifted Librarian. If it wasn’t clear enough before now, CIPA ought to make it obvious that librarians, open source advocates, and supporters of limited copyright are on the same side in the conflict over freedom of information.

Topical example: Jenny’s friday post about CIPA demonstrates one way that we in the open source world can directly aid our librarian friends, now that CIPA is really-truly not going away.

The biggest problem with so-called filters is that the commercial filter companies won’t tell their customers what they block or why. In fact, they have routinely used the DMCA to prevent their customers from discovering, except through trial and error, what exactly they are and are not allowed to see.

We can do better. (Seth Finkelstein, who knows far more about this than I do, disagrees, but bear with me.) There are already at least two open source, open block list, censorware packages available: Squidguard and DansGuardian. By using open censorware—oxymoron though it might be—librarians can at least know what they are censoring, and gain greater control over the censoring lists and processes, and so, ultimately, censor less and do less harm. The problem is, setting up these packages to work reasonably well over time, and to be configurable and monitorable by non-nerds is not trivial. For nerds, though, we’re talking about ./configure && make && make install and a little config file twiddling—and maybe a couple of cronjobs to scan logs for interesting things .

Pace Seth's objections, I think volunteering our time and nerdliness to help our allies who are caught in a pretty awful bind by an absurd law would be a good thing. So, if you are a librarian in the Chicagoland area whose library is caught in the CIPA trap and who wants to install or try DansGuardian or Squidgard, please feel free to contact me at the email address at the top of the page (or leave a comment), and if I can help, I will.

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