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There's lots of junk on the World Wide Web. And there's lots that's
worse than junk. Some of the stuff, for some people, is offensive or worse.
The worse includes material deemed obscene or, and this is a very different
category, "harmful to minors" -- aka pornography.

As I've described, there's a long and tedious history of Congress's efforts to
regulate porn in cyberspace.[11-11] I'm not interested in that story here. I'm in-
terested here in the efforts of companies to regulate porn in cyberspace by
producing code that filters content.

The code I mean is referred to affectionately as "censorware." Censor-
ware is a class of technology intended to block access to Internet content by
forbidding a Web browser to link to the blocked sites. Censorware compa-
nies make it their job to skim the Web looking for content that is objection-
able, and they then add the link to that content to their list. Their list of
banned books is then sold to parents who want to protect their kids.

There is obviously nothing wrong with parents exercising judgment over
what their kids get to see. And obviously, if the choice is no Internet or a fil-
tered Internet, it is better that kids have access to the Internet.

But this does not mean that censorware is untroubling. For often the sites
blocked by censorware systems are themselves completely unobjectionable.
Worse, sites often are blocked merely because they oppose the technology
of censorware. In December 2000, free speech activists at the civil rights
group Peacefire reported that a number of censorware systems had begun
to block Web sites affiliated with Amnesty International.[11-12] This is just the
latest in an endless series of similar cases. They all point to a technology that
is fundamentally at odds with the openness and free access of the original
Net.

In 1999, Eddy Jansson of Sweden and Matthew Skala of Canada decided
they wanted to test out one instance of censorware -- a product called Cyber
Patrol. They therefore wrote a program, CPHack, with which a user could
disable Cyber Patrol and then see which sites Cyber Patrol banned. The
code thus made it easier, for example, for a number of sites to complain
about the censorious practices of Cyber Patrol.

The owner of Cyber Patrol was not happy about CPHack. So like most
owners unhappy with what others do, it raced into federal court. In March,
Mattel brought suit against the authors and Peacefire, demanding it stop dis-
tributing its code for liberating the CP list.

Its claim was copyright violation. These coders, Mattel argued, had

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