Information society : agenda for action in the UK : evidence received after 31 March 1996 / Select Committee on Science and Technology.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords. Science and Technology Committee.
Date:
1996
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Information society : agenda for action in the UK : evidence received after 31 March 1996 / Select Committee on Science and Technology. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    153/324 (page 455)
    21 May 1996] [ Continued Baroness Hogg contd.] versa. That is something that is very difficult to do in the physical world. Chairman 789. Our time is running out but there is an important issue to discuss yet. A. This is the issue regarding content in general. We try hard to try to distinguish between two separate categories here. There is content that is only suitable for adult markets which is not illegal. It is only illegal if it is distributed to minors and there are rules as to what sort of content can be distributed to minors. It is different in different parts of the world. There are generally two classifications of contents. There is content where society will say, “This is plain illegal”, and then there is content in which society will say, “We do not want this getting into the hands of children.” The issue gets blurred too often. Our position with respect to adult material is we need to create tools that we then give to the parents which they themselves use to control what their children see, so we distribute a product called Cyber Patrol. This technology called PICS is just being adopted as an industry standard and it is targeted explicitly at this issue of adult material. The idea is that people who are publishing content on the Internet will classify it and they will say, “This contains nudity”, it is a certain type of nudity and then as an end user my software will check the classification of it and if my profile that has been set up by my parents does not allow me to see nudity then the software will not allow you to see that content. It is a fairly simple concept. Lord Flowers 790. What faith have you that providers will play the game and classify their products properly? A. I think it is going to happen for two reasons. The first one is that organisations like CompuServe have a vested interest in promoting it progressively because to the degree that we can prove that we have parental controls our legal liability is improved. It is still, frankly, a vague area, but if you are a newsagent, for example, and you are putting Playboy on the top shelf with a banner on it then your legal liability is much better than if you have it mixed in with all the comics. Basically that is what is happening here. We are promoting it. The other thing is that from a publisher’s point of view it is the same thing, their legal liability will be improved if they classify their ’ content accurately. If they do not classify it at all I ‘strongly suspect that they will find that they are more liable than they would otherwise be. I think it will be adopted. Lord Gregson 791. The encryption for PICS is already published. A. To my knowledge it is an open system. It does not rely on any encryption technology. PICS is an architecture to start off with, it is not the classification system itself. 792. It is a simple number sequence into the software at the receiver’s end. A. It is not an encrypted communication. Chairman 793. Is it not a password system? So little Willy has a password and his father does not have a password, is that correct? A. Yes, at the so-called client side. The software on the PC has to prevent access to the profiles, certainly. Lord Gregson 794. Hackers’ paradise! A. That is not part of the PICS standard. If you go to a site that has been classified with PICS you will see, if you look at the code, quite plainly how it has been classified. That is not encrypted. It is just the same as if somebody had stamped the front of their magazine saying, “Adults only”. Chairman 795. Or the same as the classification of films perhaps. A. Indeed. RSAC, the Recreational Software Advisory Council, whose classification system we are promoting, was set up two years ago because parents were concerned about trying to select video games for their children, was it violent, was it anti-semitic or whatever. 796. How would this have helped you in the Bavarian case? A. In that case the issue was to do with the distribution of adult material to minors. The material itself was not illegal and so to the extent that we could show parental controls we were off the hook and, in fact, prior to that case we did not have Cyber Patrol? so we were distributing a product that you needed a credit card to access, so really you had to be an adult to have a credit card, so there was some control but there were not overt controls. Lord Flowers 797. The bottom line is what you have got as your bottom line, is it not? A. Yes. In this field our approach is to give the parents the tools, educate them, make them realise that it is an important issue for them but let them decide. Baroness Hogg 798. Do you think that really can be sufficient as an approach? After all, we have a long history of taking a different approach to television where yes, ultimate responsibility is with the parents but there is a watershed, etcetera, etcetera and producer guidelines on how children’s programmes are made and so 2 A software product offering improved parental controls over Internet context.