RSSSupreme Court lets online porn filtration law expire
By Sharon Fisher | Published January 21, 2009, 5:50 PM
There's a saying that goes, I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death for the right to keep folks from hearing it. Or something like that. No, the Supreme Court said today, that's not how it goes.
Unconvinced by the argument that begins, "The children, the children!..." the US Supreme Court this morning refused to hear an appeal brought forth by the Bush Justice Dept., of a decision that effectively bars the government from punishing individuals for failing to protect minors from Internet-based pornography.
It had been called the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, and at the time, it had received considerable government support, including from President Clinton who ceremoniously signed it into law. The act, among other things, required Web site operators to use credit cards or adult access codes and personal identification numbers, ostensibly to keep minors from seeing pornography. Violators faced up to six months in prison and fines of up to $50,000 a day. The law was put into place after the Communications Decency Act was itself declared unconstitutional.
The law has never been enforced, as lower courts repeatedly have ruled it unconstitutional. For example, an appeals court in Philadelphia said it was overly broad and too vague, and that filtering technologies and other parental control tools offer a less restrictive way to protect children from inappropriate content online. (Not that those don't have their own problems; such as teens having trouble finding information about homosexuality, or cancer survivors getting blocked from information about breast cancer.)
The law was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union, booksellers, online magazine publishers and others. ACLU lawyers said the law would have criminalized a large amount of valuable online speech that adults are entitled to communicate and receive.
According to the government's experts in the case, the law could have criminalized not so much the distribution, but the actual the inability to filter as many as 700 million Web pages, though the mechanism for determining who could be charged with violating the law was never really worked out. Proponents of the law argued that it did not block free speech specifically, but rather the inability for others to block inappropriate free speech from being heard.
One recalls Justice Potter Stewart, who said of obscenity, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it."
I once thought the same as the others say "let the internet be free", but when you either have children, grow older or visit all kinds of crazy websites made by crazy people, one changes mind.
There are some kinds of contents that are illegal or product of illegal actions like a video of some guys beating a girl to death (murder) or child porn.
As any communication channel the internet should have at least a minimum control, and I enfasize minimum. True that the internet should be "free"er speech than, say open TV but there are some things that are plain bad.
Aside of these, the governments shouldnt spend lot of resources enforcing the websites permisible contents but should enforce that all sold computers, public access computers (like internet cafes), schools and maybe some companies have an any-brand parental control software, just like the cars must have an insurance policy.
I know that some parental control softwares are plain lame and that almost anyone could turn it off (even virures) but its better way to make the internet safer for kids.. including my own.
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|There is indeed a saying that goes: I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death for the right to ALLOW folks to say it. - NOT "to keep folks from hearing it!"
Unfortunately, the saying supports the freedom of speech and the end of said provision.
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|Let the internet be free. While I do not agree that porn is a good industry at all but when you try to regulate that, it will be no time at all before the Governments of the world try to regulate something else to remove our freedom's from us. We do not need regulation of the internet, if parents cannot control their child or children, it is not up to the government to interfere and become baby sitters. We are sick to death of the government and religious fanatics telling us what we can do.
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|"I do not agree that porn is a good industry"
The content may disturb and bother many people, but most people do not understand how "good" the industry actually is. The popularity and perhaps decision in the VHS vs. Betamax war was the result of the pornography industry. The popularity of the internet was the result, in part, due to pornography. While not all pornography is "good", pornography has many categories and levels. Art is pornographic, speech can be pornographic. Restrictions and protections for children are essential and necessary, but should not be regulated by the government. Everyone's definition of taste and tolerance differs, and therefore it would be impossible to define the good and bad ones.
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|Yes it's funny how the child protection organizations tend to focus on lobbying the Gov't. to protect the childeren rather than educate and call on parents to protect their childeren.
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|They lobby the government because while the government is large, the pool of parents in our country is much larger. Right or not, it is because it is easier and more likely to succeed.
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|Not to mention that the intelligence of the average politician is lower than the average citizen (a rather scary thought after you spend an afternoon people watching in the neighborhood Wal-Mart! ;-)
And they respond more easily to simple promises of patronage...and donations. Amazing the simple forces that can effectively control that herd of cats.
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|...spoken like someone who's never owned cats. :p
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|Intrusive_Rogue: couldn't have said it better myself. It's high time parents learn to take action for there own kids and stop making the gov't spend billions on doing it for them. There is plenty of services, programs, filtering proxies and etc. In addition plenty of websites with info to help in your discovery on this subject.
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