Third, because information available on the web has to be prohibited globally in order to be prohibited at all, the private censors are working to bend the long-traditional rules that limit the power of courts to act within their own territorial jurisdictions. Suddenly those of us who study these issues are seeing an explosion of requests to state and federal courts in the U.S. to enjoin linking and distribution throughout the Web. So may a court in Iraq or Cuba tell U.S. citizens in the U.S. what they can and cannot read? Of course not. But a U.S. court can censor citizens of Canada and Sweden, or enjoin "mirror sites" located all over the world. That's not the rule of law, just corporate imperialism.

Last, but by no means least, these cases show a disturbing trend among corporations that market to young people who are suing, punishing and bullying their own customer base. A Norwegian 16-year-old, Jon Johansen, is under criminal prosecution in Norway, at the behest of American movie studios, for releasing a program that helps to play DVD movies on non-Windows computers, but could also theoretically be used to make unauthorized copies of those DVDs. The Recording Industry Association of America is suing to prohibit distribution of Napster, a program for sharing MP3 music files used by hundreds of thousands of mostly young music lovers around the world. And Mattel, a company that makes products only young people use, is bullying their own market, trying to prohibit criticism of the censorware they sell adults to control young people's reading.

The arrogance of businesses that intimidate their own customers is hard to fathom because it is so utterly counterproductive. Who will buy the movies, the music and the Mattel toys once those corporations have made themselves infamous throughout the Internet for prosecuting and harassing children? Private censorship through the intellectual property system is disgusting, but when practiced against one's own present and future customers it is also foolish. Perhaps mobilized consumers, boycotting products made by companies that sue to censor young people, will help those companies learn the error of their ways.

Eben Moglen is a professor of law at Columbia University Law School. He serves without fee as general counsel of the Free Software Foundation.