President Bush, the father, signed the American’s with Disabilities Act in 1990. The act never mentions cyberspace and the Internet. The World Wide Web as we know it was not opened to the content we know today until a year or two after that law was authored. The act does apply to places of “public accommodation.” 
 

Does it mean physical places or does it also apply to the virtual world of the Internet? The judge was guided by the act where it includes inns, hotels, restaurants, bars, theaters, auditoriums, bakeries, Laundromats, terminals, depots, museums, parks, nursery schools, day care centers, senior citizen centers and others. Those and other examples in the statute are clearly physical, bricks and wood, places.

The Plaintiffs however pointed Judge Seitz to three portions of the law’s definitions and claimed those sections expanded the reach of the law to Southwest’s website.  Those phrases include; “place of exhibition or entertainment,” “place of public display or collection,” and “other sales or rental establishment.”  

To spare you the legalese, and at least one Latin phrase, suffice it to say the judge ruled that the inclusion of those general phrases were limited by the categories in which they were used. In short, they applied to other uses within the category, not whole new categories. For instance, “other sales or rental establishment” was in the category that began with, “bakery, grocery store, clothing store, hardware store, [and] shopping center.” Presumably it means a meat market would be covered as a sales establishment because it is in the same category as a bakery or grocery store.

Judge Seitz ruling has been criticized and Anita Ramasastry’s article, The Americans with Disabilities Act in Cyberspace: Should Web-only Businesses be Required to be Disabled-Accessible? at FindLaw’s website presents that opposing view. She believes, 

The Worm asks for Permission 
We are all familiar with malicious Internet worm programs that infect computers and then send copies of the program to the email addresses listed in your Web program’s address book. TheW32/Bugbear@MM and the W32/Klez.h@MM worms are infamous examples of the lot.

But, what if the program asked for permission to do it? What if that request was buried in the license agreement for an on-line greeting card? How many of us read the fine print when we want to download something.

That is exactly what has happed with the “FriendGreetings” program. If you receive a message telling you that a greeting card is waiting for you as a certain site and you attempt to download it, you are asked to agree to an End User License. What is particularly irksome about this one is it trusts that most people will just accept the terms unknowingly to get on with reading their card. Just to make sure it will slip past, the site required two separate agreements. According to Ed Foster in his GripeLine column, Sneakwrapping a Virus  for InfoWorld, it was in the second contract that the user was supposedly giving permission for the program to raid the address book and send copies to all of the contacts. McAfee’s website contains a screen shot of the License Agreement clause that contains the following. It is worth quoting in full just to indicate what can be buried in License agreements — including getting Microsoft’s name wrong.