Mar 27 2007
Anti Porn Law Struck Down in the Name of Free Speech
GUEST: Pamela Paul, author of “Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families
In 1998, Federal law makers drafted the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA, with the intent of protecting children from porn and other indecent material on the Web. The law would have fined commercial Web sites up to $50,000 a day and six months in prison for each day they disseminated information deemed “harmful to children.” But COPA never took effect because a court barred enforcement pending the outcome of legal challenges. Now, the law has finally been declared dead after U.S. District Court Judge Lowell Reed Jr. struck it down last week. The judge’s decision was greeted positively by a group called the Free Speech Coalition, which is actually a trade association for the pornography industry. According to Judge Reed the law is too narrow in its failure to address technologies such as peer-to-peer file sharing, community sites, and foreign sources. But Reed also thinks the law is too broad in that it targets speech protected under the U.S. Constitution. The ACLU, which was very involved in the campaign contended that the COPA law “could result in a loss of appropriate and valuable content for adults, including information about safe sex or art galleries with modern photography.” The anti-COPA ruling is a legal precedent that could make it impossible to further regulate online pornography.
Pamela Paul’s website is www.pamelapaul.com.
2 Responses to “Anti Porn Law Struck Down in the Name of Free Speech”
I’m sorry, but this lady is fully delusional. The key to protecting children from porn is not making free-speech limiting legislation. The key is frank and opened talk about human sexuality. I don’t agree with government legislating sexuality. We might as well go back to the days when homosexual behavior was illegal because it was bad for children. Talk to your children! My God, is she so glib about turning over more child rearing responsibilities to the state?
I only wish the law thrown out were the sister legislation to this, called CIPA for “Child Internet Protection Act”, mandating internet filters at libraries & other government-funded sites. With CIPA, libraries use internet filters that filter out EVERYTHING, especially political dissent that’s critical of the Bush administration. The software companies who make filter programs claim that they can’t review each page, and that “political only” content is filtered out by ACCIDENT. This is NOT TRUE. Political sites like presidentmoron.com, toostupidtobepresident.com, bettybowers.com, and many others are BLOCKED by libraries, yet have never had any porno on them at all. The NYU Law Schools’ Brennan Center produced an excellent publication on this that you can download for free:
http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/filters2.pdf
Any time someone claims they’re limiting free speech to HELP people, be very suspicious. Kids have been looking at porno for years — so what? Is that a reason to let corporations control what everyone else is allowed to read? I’ve seen parents drop their kids off at libraries unsupervised for half the day, apparently as a form of babysitting. And those kids pretty much just use the library computers to play games, not view porno. If parents were that worried about porno, they could leave their kids at home to watch TV, or drop them off at a relative’s house. Porno isn’t the issue — setting the precedent for the legal death of the 1st amendment is!