WOW - The First Major Win For The Adult Industry

[Lee]

The Child Online Protection Act, now a decade old, appears to be permanently, completely, and otherwise absolutely dead now that the Supreme Court has rejected Bush Administration pleas to consider reviving the law one more time. According to the Associated Press, the rejection was made without comment by the justices.

Ten long years

COPA was passed back in 1998 under President Clinton after the earlier Communications Decency Act contained some much broader provisions that were eventually struck down. To keep children away from harmful (mostly pornographic) content, COPA was drawn up to be narrower in scope. As passed, though, the bill required US-based websites displaying anything that might violate "contemporary community standards" to bar kids from accessing the material. Those failing to comply with the law would face fines of up to $50,000 and six months in prison.

Opponents of the law sued to block enforcement almost immediately, and in the ten years since the law was passed, it has never been enforced. The law has passed up and down the court system repeatedly, already ending up in the Supreme Court once already in 2004, when enforcement of COPA was blocked pending further review.

In 2007, a federal court issued a permanent injunction against enforcing the law, saying that it violated the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. That ruling came after a four-week trial featuring an array of plaintiffs that included the American Civil Liberties Union, Salon.com, Condomania (described in the opinion as the "nation's first condom store"), the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other organizations and individuals. The government continued to appeal.

In 2008, a federal appeals court agreed unanimously that COPA was too broad. Still undeterred after a decade of losing battles, the government appealed again to the Supreme Court, which has now declined to hear the case.

Data debates

The COPA saga was also noteworthy for the government's attempt to force search engines to turn over big chunks of data in order to bolster the government's case.

Throughout the litigation process, government lawyers had argued that technological measures like filters were inadequate. To support that argument, the Department of Justice issued subpoenas to the major search engines, hoping to find search-term data that would support its argument. Google fought the DoJ, resisting the subpoena for some time while its competitors handed over the desired data.

The data that the DoJ gathered did little to impress the judge, as he ruled that the US government failed to demonstrate that the law is the "least restrictive alternative" available.

The whole sorry saga has now inauspiciously ended, though it's no doubt just a matter of time before another legislator decides to "think of the children" and we go through it again.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ruly-dead.html

Finally COPA has been struck down although, as this article says im also pretty sure its just a matter of time before some blowhard law maker with a stick up his ass decides to re-write it in another format.

Regards,

Lee

[nickbaer]

There's probably more to come.

We used to say "another shoe to drop," but maybe now it's "another shoe thrown"... as unconstitutional remnants of the Bush administration peel away.

[maxx68]

The government is such hypocrites! Kids can watch people being tortured and murdered online, but god forbid they should come across some porn. I'm not saying we as webmasters shouldn't take the initiative and try to prevent the little ones from seeing adult content, but shouldn't the laws encompass EVERYTHING that could offend community standards?

I think this law was more or less just another attempt to go after the big bad queers!

And whose community are we basing standards on? Some christo-fascist, bible thumping a-holes who think it's alright for toddlers to marry?