Among the many U.S. Supreme Court decisions felt at the local level, one recent ruling may be of interest to anyone who opens a book, studies for an exam or starts a Web-filtering business. The June 23 decision to uphold the Children’s Internet Protection Act means business for some San Diego companies.

St. Bernard Software is capitalizing on the filter market boon with its iPrism. The filtering instincts of iPrism are tied to the observations of 15 trained employees who troll the Net each night and update the products. “We think we are the best 100 percent human-reviewed Web filtering solution out there,” says Lee Itzhaki, product manager for St. Bernard.

Some Web filtering companies are much larger in size, including San Diego’s Websense, which trades on the Nasdaq and leads the world with 24 percent of the secure content management market. The cyber successes they are having make some nervous. The American Library Association and California Library Association voice concerns of government censorship and distortion.

But Itzhaki says that with human review of each categorized site, the “false-positive rate for accessibility is extremely limited.” This simply means that with iPrism, a breast cancer awareness help site will not turn up under a porn detector and instead will be included under a health category. (iPrism makes use of 60 separate categories to collate sites.)

Categorization aside, Itzhaki “expects a lot more users by spring,” as the ALA begins to fully comply with the court’s decision. Mainly this means that these public places of learning will be required to administer filtering software on their peripherals, no matter how minimal their federal funding status. For St. Bernard, this can only mean an increase from a clientele “base of 100-200” to a larger share of the expected $360 million filtering gross in the year 2003. But money is not only made from civic partners.

“Three thousand dollars are lost per employee every year,” bemoans Itzhaki, “all of it due to non-business Web use.”

As businesses take up recreational Internet use reform from a management vantage point, St. Bernard stands ready to assist. One iPrism client uses iPrism to filter for 1,000 employees, all of whom have different category settings, depending on their assigned tasks. St. Bernard has arguably made a product that works just as well for a community library as it does for the headquarters of a publicly traded corporation.

— Sam Schramski