Three landmark cases in digital communication included Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997) (Moore, 2012, p. 353), Zeran v. America Online, Inc. (1998) (Moore, 2012, p. 420), and Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011) (Moore, 2012, p. 202) changed the landscape of the digital communications world we live in today. In 1997, The Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union case protected online freedom of speech. It addressed the Communications Decency Act’s sections passed to control the exposure of young people to unsuitable images and material. The Act’s "indecent transmission" and "patently offensive display" stipulations curtail "the freedom of speech" sheltered by the First Amendment. Also in 1997, The Zeran v. America Online, …show more content…
Some suggested it should be regulated like a print media, there was argument it should be regulated like broadcast media, and forward thinking people suggested it was an completely new type of media. With this decision, the court determined that, on the Internet, adults viewing to only what is fit for all audiences. Other means of controlling online content would be less restrictive methods would have to be favored, methods such as parent -controlled filtering software. This decision “by no means affected the regulation of indecency in broadcasting and other forms of telecommunications.” (Moore, …show more content…
It called into question a component of the Communications Decency Act, the law’s contentious Section 230, which held that, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (Zeran v. America Online, Inc., 1997). A ruling in Zeran’s favor might have obliged every website to scrutinize every fragment of content it published. Zeran v. AOL most definitely is responsible for our entire state of user generated content. If this case had been ruled in favor of Zeran, every website would need to hire armies of people with complex legal educations to evaluate every piece of content on its site. It would necessitate millions of lawyers whose only concern would be assessing all the user generated