[Infowarrior] - More on COPA smackdown

[Richard Forno]

U.S. Judge Blocks 1998 Online Porn Law

By MARYCLAIRE DALE
The Associated Press
Thursday, March 22, 2007; 10:39 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/22/AR2007032200
616_pf.html

PHILADELPHIA -- A federal judge on Thursday dealt another blow to government
efforts to control Internet pornography, striking down a 1998 U.S. law that
makes it a crime for commercial Web site operators to let children access
"harmful" material.

In the ruling, the judge said parents can protect their children through
software filters and other less restrictive means that do not limit the
rights of others to free speech.

"Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment
protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the
name of their protection," wrote Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr.,
who presided over a four-week trial last fall.

The law would have criminalized Web sites that allow children to access
material deemed "harmful to minors" by "contemporary community standards."
The sites would have been expected to require a credit card number or other
proof of age. Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in
prison.

Sexual health sites, the online magazine Salon.com and other Web sites
backed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law. They argued
that the Child Online Protection Act was unconstitutionally vague and would
have had a chilling effect on speech.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a temporary injunction in 2004 on grounds the
law was likely to be struck down and was perhaps outdated.

Technology experts said parents now have more serious concerns than Web
sites with pornography. For instance, the threat of online predators has
caused worries among parents whose children use social-networking sites such
as News Corp.'s MySpace.

The case sparked a legal firestorm last year when Google challenged a
Justice Department subpoena seeking information on what people search for
online. Government lawyers had asked Google to turn over 1 million random
Web addresses and a week's worth of Google search queries.

A judge sharply limited the scope of the subpoena, which Google had fought
on trade secret, not privacy, grounds.

To defend the nine-year-old Child Online Protection Act, government lawyers
attacked software filters as burdensome and less effective, even though they
have previously defended their use in public schools and libraries.

"It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder
the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their
children, rather than the government's addressing the problem at its
source," a government attorney, Peter D. Keisler, argued in a post-trial
brief.

Critics of the law argued that filters work best because they let parents
set limits based on their own values and their child's age.

The law addressed material accessed by children under 17, but applied only
to content hosted in the United States.

The Web sites that challenged the law said fear of prosecution might lead
them to shut down or move their operations offshore, beyond the reach of the
U.S. law. They also said the Justice Department could do more to enforce
obscenity laws already on the books.

The 1998 law followed Congress' unsuccessful 1996 effort to ban online
pornography. The Supreme Court in 1997 deemed key portions of that law
unconstitutional because it was too vague and trampled on adults' rights.

The newer law narrowed the restrictions to commercial Web sites and defined
indecency more specifically.

In 2000, Congress passed a law requiring schools and libraries to use
software filters if they receive certain federal funds. The high court
upheld that law in 2003.