Friday, March 28, 2008

Information rights.

Who has them? Does age matter?
Do you have to be over 18 to benefit from the freedom of speech?
The folks at blogscoped bring up a good point.
Link
How old do you have to be to benefit from the freedom of information? Information wants to be free, Dude!

If I may recklessly predict, this issue will come up in the courts if it hasn't already. Can we/should we limit what young people can search for?

As one who begrudgingly moves into adulthood, hell yeah kids should be able to learn about what's out there. Should a ten year old be able to search adult websites, no. Should a ten year old be able to search for information on sexual health? Well, if they are ready to learn about the health risks, hell yeah! Who determines when a ten year old is ready to learn these things? I know plenty of ten year olds who are smarter than the adults who teach them.

1 comment:

Sam Grace said...

Actually, the information accessibility thing has already come up with adults around child porn. Can I say that without getting anyone in trouble? It's crazy. If I recall, a couple who ran an adult porn site in the U.S. provided links to a site in another country that had child porn and the U.S. people were put in jail for like 18 months. The gov't took over their website and made it into a sting operation over the next 4 years.

There's already been a lot of hubbub about how to limit what people view and post and where, exactly, people who break the laws should be prosecuted. The "indecency" laws used to be dependent on cultural norms so they'd be, for example, much more strict in rural Kansas than SanFran, but obviously such standards no longer apply.