Congress vs Misleading Meta Tags 473
Krishna Dagli writes "The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a bill that would make it a federal felony for Webmasters to use innocent words like "Barbie" or "Furby" but actually feature sexual content on their sites. Anyone who includes misleading "words" or "images" intended to confuse a minor into viewing a possibly harmful Web site could be imprisoned for up to 20 years and fined, the bill says." Terrible news for the Barbie/Furbie fetishists out there, to say nothing about being completely impossible to enforce globally.
Re:Isn't it a bit late for that? (Score:2, Informative)
Oops (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What about all the other Barbies? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Get Google to delist it. (Score:1, Informative)
And, I think that you are actually missing the point. The government isn't making it illegal to use keywords that don't perfectly reflect the content of the site... that's just a "whatever" thing. What is illegal is trying to trick kids to come to a porn site. It is very narrow and scope, and doesn't infringe on anyone's free speech rights, unless they are trying to trick kids to come to a porn site. If the keywords are legitimate with respect to the site's content, then it isn't illegal.
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
If you two are finished tossing verbal grenades, you might want to stop and notice that you're both right -- and both wrong. Congressman as a noun means a member of congress. That applies to both senators and members of the House. As a title, it refers specifically to a member of the House, as in Congressman Foo (as opposed to Senator Bar). That makes the GP right and you wrong.
Having said that, the GP capitalized the word which, while wrong in the specific usage, at least implies the word's use as a title. That makes you right and the GP wrong.
In the long run, I suppose it doesn't really matter. This is /., which makes it far more interesting to dip each other's hair in inkwells, or shoot spitballs, or whatever the hell the drive-by jerk behavior d'jour is. By all means, stay as far as hell away from a meaningful discussion of the topic as possible.
20 Years? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Meta tags? Does this even matter? (Score:2, Informative)