Supreme Court deals death blow to antiporn law

Baack · Jan 22, 2009

Cybers Poll Jan 12-18

The U.S. Department of Justice has been trying since 1998 to convince courts that a federal antiporn law targeting sexually explicit Web sites was constitutional.
No longer. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected prosecutors' last-ditch defense of the Child Online Protection Act, meaning that the law will not be enforced.
COPA was enacted during the anti-Internet porn scares of the late 1990s, in part as a narrower answer to a previous Net censorship law that also met its demise in the courts. Any commercial Web site operator that posts "material that is harmful to minors" faces six months in prison and a fine of up to $50,000.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the law in Philadelphia, saying the prohibition was so broad and vague that even traditional publishers could face fines and imprisonment. Plaintiffs included Salon.com, which occasionally publishes racy material, the California-based lesbian-gay A Different Light Bookstore, PlanetOut, and a now-defunct coalition that included CNET Networks (publisher of CNET News), The New York Times Co., and Reuters. (A CNET executive testified against the law in January 1999.)
"It is not the role of the government to decide what people can see and do on the Internet," ACLU staff attorney Chris Hansen said in a statement on Wednesday. "Those are personal decisions that should be made by individuals and their families."
As a side note, it was the Justice Department's ongoing defense of COPA in 2006 that led to its subpoena to Google asking for a "random sampling" of .
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http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10147171-38.html

Biker · Jan 22, 2009

Excellent call on the court's part. The law was far too broad and left far too much room for abuse.

punkinhed · Jan 23, 2009

scary to think about this law in effect with someone like palin in the white house.

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