Table of Contents

• Introduction
  1. Summary Of National Legislation
     1. Material That Would Likely Be Considered Offensive Under Most Industry Or Governmental Rating Systems Such As Child Pornography, Material Harmful To Children, Excessively Violent Material, Material That Promotes, Incites Or Instructs In Matters Of Crime Or Violence.
     2. Material That Vilifies People On The Basis Of Race, Gender, Sexual Preference Or Disability Or Incites Or Promotes Hatred On Those Bases.
     3. Improper Use Or Disclosure Of Private Information.
     4. Defamatory Material
     5. Material That Infringes Intellectual Property Rights.
     6. False, Fraudulent Or Misleading Consumer Information.
     7. Material Reflecting National Or Cultural Attributes Mandated In A Broadcast Medium Or Banned As Contrary To The Culture's Interest.
     8. Regulated Industries.
  2. Self-Regulatory Initiatives.
  3. Content Blocking - Technical Aspects.
• Annex 1: Members Of The Working Group
• Annex 2: Glossary
• Annex 3: Bibliography And List Of Urls

Introduction

The following is the report of the ILPF Content Blocking Working Group. It has been prepared on behalf of the ILPF by Olswang, a London law firm specialising in multimedia law, under the supervision of and based in part on contributions from Working Group Members. The report has been thoroughly reviewed and approved by the Working Group.

However, it is acknowledged by the ILPF that the state of Internet law and regulation is constantly evolving. Consequently the ILPF, while confident that the report provides a comprehensive study of the situation in a wide range of territories as at April 1997, is submitting the report to the public via the World Wide Web as "work in progress" in order to seek comments on its contents.

The ILPF therefore now requests your assistance in gathering further information on any country's content regulations not covered in this report and also requests comments on the interpretation of the countries' content regulations already represented.

The current members of the Working Group are set out in Annex 1.

The prime objective of the Working Group has been to examine the range of existing content laws which governments have sought to apply to the Internet in any country of the world, to isolate whether these laws relate specifically to the Internet or concern the application of more general rules to specific Internet-related problems and, finally, to examine the range of self-regulatory initiatives which have sprung up and how these might be treated under the various legal regimes.

The structure of the report is to examine each other area of regulated, or potentially regulated, content in turn, and under each heading to identify those countries where we are aware that cases or legislative discussions have taken place, to briefly identify the nature of those discussions and to identify available web and other resources. Self-regulatory initiatives which have commenced in Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, the UK, the US and others have then been examined in terms of their possible overall application.

Finally, consideration is given to the technical means of achieving Content Blocking and some of the issues which are raised by those technologies which currently exist or whose developments are anticipated.

The ILPF is anxious to improve and expand this report and looks forward to fruitful collaboration with interested parties around the world.

May 1997