Arts
Host: Colette Vogele Guest: Kurt Opsahl, Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation Kurt’s work at the EFF focuses on civil liberties, free speech and privacy law. Before joining EFF, Opsahl worked at Perkins Coie, where he represented technology clients with respect to intellectual property, privacy, defamation, and other online liability matters. Kurt also has past affiliations as research fellow to Professor Pamela Samuelson at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems. Kurt also co-authored the Electronic Media and Privacy Law Handbook. Topics for Episode 009: In today’s episode, we discuss with Kurt Opsahl the background of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Kurt describes the congressional goals of the the CDA, a piece of the lengthly telecom legislation passed in 1996. Since its passage, other sections of the CDA have been struck down under constitutional challenges. Section 230, however, thrives today by providing fairly broad protection for intermediaries of content on the internet, which often includes podcasters (as well as eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and many more…).