"Pornography" Law Suffers Yet Another Court Defeat
This was an idiotically broad law -- requiring internet service providers to stop kids from seeing female breasts etc. How could the companies do that? Even parents often cannot:
"A US federal appeals court today struck down COPA, the Child Online Protection Act, a Clinton-era censorship law that the Justice Department has been struggling to get implemented for a decade. (The ACLU filed suit as soon as COPA was signed in 1998 and won an immediate injunction.) The battle has made it to the Supreme Court twice, and the DoJ has essentially never gotten any satisfaction out of the courts. This was the case for which the DoJ famously went trolling for search histories.
In the ruling issued today, the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower-court ruling that COPA violates the First Amendment because it is not the most effective way to keep children from visiting adult Web sites. The law would require sites to check visitors' ages, e.g. by taking a credit card, if the site contained any material that is "harmful to minors," whatever that means.
Source
Background on the law here. Any defeat for censorship makes it potentially harder for other attempts at censorship to succeed.
Note that the above issue of what children are allowed to see is quite separate from the issue of pornographic images of children. The ISP companies have agreed to block sites with child pornography on them. See here.
5 comments:
oh wow - children seeing female breasts - make it a law to bottle-feed from birth!
The ISP companies have agreed to block sites with child pornography on them.
No, they haven't.
The linked article states that Comcast is being sued by NY for failing to agree to a "code of conduct." The contents of said code have not been made public. However, in the face of other lawsuits from attorney general Cuomo, Time Warner and AOL did not agree to stop newsgroups that disseminated child porn, they just stopped all Usenet groups. Verizon did the same thing under the threat of extortion from Cuomo. Legitimate groups went out the window.
Usenet groups have been onthe decline in recent years, so perhaps the decision of Time Warner, AOL and Verizon are just "coincidental" to Cuomo's threats of a lawsuit.
The article may be refering to an agreement signed by an industry cable group that prevent the hosting of child porn sites on servers owned or controlled by those companies. The companies have agreed to report, as is required by Federal law, child porn sites that attempt to be hosted on their servers. The group also indicated they will surgically limit newsgroups that disseminate child porn.
This is not the same as blocking sites as the post states. Furthermore, Cuomo's heavy handed and probably illegal tactics should be the source of a "Tongue Tied" post all its own.
Isn't it my job as a parent to monitor what my child is exposed to??? If I don't want him using the computer, I can password protect the login. Censorship to protect one group is still censorship. Will they restrict access to National Geographic? It's not porn, but breasts are exposed.
Newsgroups disseminate child porn?
There is no substitute for being in the room and monitoring your children's activity on the web. You wouldn't let them run loose in the mall (or at least you shouldn't), this is really no different.
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