Porn on the Web. A decade ago, a sensationalistic cover story in Time magazine brought Internet pornography to public attention. The Internet was full of pornography, or so it said: 83.5% of digitized images on .binaries newsgroups were pornographic. At one university, 13 of the 40 most popular newsgroups were sexually oriented. Most of the sexual pictures, it said, originated from adult bulletin boards specializing in hard-core pornography. It told the story of a 10-year-old who was e-mailed a file filled pictures of deviant sexual acts.  »

Congress recently passed the Family Movie Act. This act gives companies the right to produce technology that automatically skips over portions of movies that consumers deem objectionable, such as violent and sexual content. Many knowledgeable observers believed that such technology was already legal, but further development was being chilled by the threat of lawsuits from the movie industry, which had already sued ClearPlay, and two other companies that subsequently went out of business.

While the bill attracted broad support in Congress, the Free Expression Policy Project worried that this might ultimately become a mandate on schools to "censor" movies that are presented to schoolchildren. The Directors guild notes that the same kind of editing could be used to change political content or historical "facts," and ultimately allow others to profit from the creative work of screenwriters and producers. The other side of the story is that the studios are still profiting from the sale of their property, and consumers (including schools) arguably should be free to use a legally purchased product in the way they want. Bloggers have taken up the discussion on Charles Bailey's Digital Koans. Read these posts and answer these questions.

• Should consumers have the right to skip portions of digital works that they don't want to see (or hear)?
• Conversely, do artists and producers have a right to have their work viewed (or heard) by consumers in the way they intended?
• Might your answer to the above questions change as technology makes more sophisticated editing possible, so that the author's message could effectively be turned upside down without the viewer realize that anything is being changed?

Suppose that instead of producing software to edit a work and selling software to consumers, you use a device to alter the work itself (without making a copy). Have you violated copyright? This issue is not addressed by the Family Movie Act. The Directors Guild of America sued CleanFlicks, a Utah company that buys videotapes of movies and edits them to remove scenes that their customers consider objectionable, saying contends that such editing violates copyright by presenting to the public an unauthorized view of a director's work, in effect making judgments that often violate the artistic integrity of the product. CleanFlicks responds that once it buys the tapes, it owns them and has the right to edit them and allow parents to view them with their children without worrying about foul language or other "adult" material. Is this more pernicious than ClearPlay's approach, or should the law treat the two exactly the same? »