I was just searching to see what happened with the vote on New York Senate Bill S66 (either scroll down two posts or click to read my thoughts about the bill) today, and while it was unsurprisingly impossible to find any information on the outcome (it's quite possible that it's been postponed due to the juicier issues of the day in Albany), I found a brief paper on the topic by a group perhaps a bit more knowledgeable about the law than myself, The New York City Bar Association. The paper is available here, but in case you don't follow the link, suffice it to say that it opens with the words: THIS BILL IS DISAPPROVED (caps and bold from the source).

The NYC Bar specifically denounces the idea that we should be prohibiting even the endorsement of such an activity, "illegalizing or at least chilling a considerable amount of constitutionally protected speech." With specific regard to the restrictions the bill would place upon the Internet, they write, "Nor it is in the public interest for the New York State Legislature to attempt to keep information from U.S. web users: such an attempt can only prove futile, given the vastness of the Internet; waste public resources; and as discussed above, chill valid and protected speech."

My thoughts exactly.

It's also quite disappointing (although, as I said before, unsurprising) that there is so little information on this matter readily available on the web. A Google search for New York Senate S66 yields only three relevant results (at least in the first two pages of results), two of which are links to this site (one to my previous post and one to my copy of the text of the bill) and the other being the PDF of the NYC Bar paper linked above. Is it any wonder legislation like this slips through our system unnoticed? Hats off to projects and organizations like Readable Laws and Sunlight Foundation who are trying to change that.