Companies Bid for Library, School Smut Filters
BR Companies Bid for Library, School Smut Filters By Neil Munro Staff Writer High-tech entrepreneurs stand to gain as publicly funded libraries and schools grope for a technical compromise to warring principles: How to protect online free speech, while barring kids from viewing online porn. "This market has the potential to be a cash cow," said Mike Kangior, a spokesman for Log On Data Corp. of Anaheim, Calif. Schools' demand for the techno
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Companies Bid for Library, School Smut Filters
By Neil Munro
Staff Writer
High-tech entrepreneurs stand to gain as publicly funded libraries and schools grope for a technical compromise to warring principles: How to protect online free speech, while barring kids from viewing online porn.
"This market has the potential to be a cash cow," said Mike Kangior, a spokesman for Log On Data Corp. of Anaheim, Calif.
Schools' demand for the technology should double the market to $5 million during the next year, said Susan Getgood, director of marketing for Microsystems Software Inc. of Framingham, Mass.
Additional revenues will flow from sales to parents or companies trying to curb their employees' recreational use of the Internet, as well as to overseas buyers, say industry executives.
The market is being stimulated by the Supreme Court's June decision to strike down the 1995 Communications Decency Act, said Kangior, whose company has already sold its smut-filtering software product to 115 school districts, including one district with 90,000 students and 10,000 networked computers.
Any eventual resolution to this dispute between free speech advocates and anti-pornography advocates in schools and libraries will emerge from messy battles among local governments, school boards, civil libertarians, judges and the high-tech companies competing for smut-filtering contracts, say academic experts and industry executives.