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Appeals Court Rejects Child Online Protection Act, Again
mabesty writes "From The Washington Post: A panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that COPA restricts free speech by barring Web page operators from posting information inappropriate for minors unless they limit the site to adults. The ruling upholds an injunction blocking the government from enforcing the law." We last covered COPA when the Supreme Court handled it last year.
Nobody denies the right to have adult-oriented content out on the web, but it shouldn't be shoved in your face quite so easily. When I signed up for cable-modem access, for example, and the guy came out to set things up, the first time I accessed the email account it already had about a dozen spams, some for porn sites. While COPA may not be a good idea, something needs to be done, period.
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Why not inforce a rule asking people providing adult material to have a meta tag specifying this exactly, or send it some way or another, so that censorship programs can read this and disallow it for children, I think a kid wanting to see adult material will know his way through clicking buttons telling he is over 18 years old.
Khalid
"What you 'seek' is what you get!"
How about this one.
Whenever congress (or state legislatures) pass a law that is later found to be unconstitutional, public funds must be used to reimburse all legal costs that were incurred in bringing the suit and having the unconstitutional law found to be unconstitutional.
Why should private or industry money have to be used to combat ridiculous laws that legislators can freely pass at a whim? Let's make them at least have to budget the cost of overturning their unconstitutional laws.
Example. Some hypothetical attorney general, let's call him "Asscruft", proposes to congress, and congress later passes, and the president signs a bill making it illegal to think bad thoughts under penalty of 5 years of $500,000.
Everyone would be screaming to have this overturned. Lots of private money would have to be used to get this nonsense overturned. Why should the citizenry be forced to overturn bad laws that they didn't want but that their "representatives" thought would be good for them, or that corporate interests bought and paid for?
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Parents are so quick to scream for laws to protect their children, regardless of the restrictions it places on rest of the public. and yet if we were to legislate parenting licenses to ensure parents were watching their children properly, you'd see the biggest hell-storm to ever sweep across the nation. Where's the fairness in that?
If we can't tell you how to raise your children, then don't tell us how to raise our Internet. Watch your kids, for god's sake.
+ G to tha Izzo, A to tha Tizee, Talking Giz-oat, Ya'll Bettah Feel Me... +
I'm sick of laws trying to be passed to make up for bad parenting. It is not the government's responsibility to raise your children, people.
Why? If you're a parent, then it's your responsibility to do whatever you feel is appropriate in terms of looking after your kids. It's not the rest of societies problem. Parents are doing far too much insisting on protection 'for the children' which ends up restricting what adults can do. Do your job, don't expect me to do it for you.
My inbox, however, gets flooded with tons of offers from 'Women who want to meet me' and 'office secret admirer's' every day. The penis growth stuff is mostly filtered, now, though.
Educating the ---ing parents might be a good start, don't you think? After all, parents are supposed to be responsible for, and interested in, the education and upbringing of thier children - what an increasing number of people fail to grasp is that this is a two-way process: children should learn from the adults and vice versa.
Arguments about "but I don't have time" or, "I can't understand" should result in the children being taken into responsible care and the parents shot as an attempt to keep the stupid gene out of the gene pool: if you don't have time for your kids, if you don't have the patience to live and work with them, if you don't want to make the effort to learn with them, you shouldn't ----ing have them in the first place.
It's going to be tough. You gotta think back to your childhood. Back then all we had was cable TV and the "Playboy Channel." Granted it was only softcore porn, but it was the unspoken goal of all 13 years old boys to sneak a peek at the verboten channel, even if it was scrambled. (You had to hope for scenes with a heavy white background in order for it to come out straight.)
Even if you lock everything down in your house, you know damn well, there's gonna be some other kid on the block whose parents are less watchful. If you impose all these restrictions, I predict your child will begin asking to spend an inordinate amount of time over a friends house to "study." Forget the laws. This is the Internet. No one is going to be able to regulate all the offensive material coming from all over the world all the time. Once kids find something that gets through the filter, the URL will spread like wildfire.
I'm sure we're going to hear again from the gang that just wants to "protect the children." And we're going to hear from the people who want parents to surf the Net with their children, thus combatting the problem from another approach.
Might I suggest a different approach?
Children are going to be exposed to bad things. They always have. At home I have a book titled "Pioneer Women." It's about the roles of women in settling the western United States. One photograph is particularly memorable. It's of a small child looking at the body of man who's just been killed in a gun fight. I suspect that's more traumatic than seeing a bit of pr0n on the Internet.
When I was a child, I was exposed to information about the Holocaust and World War II. As a teenager I lived through the Cuban missile crisis and the Kennedy assassination. Children today have been exposed to the horrors of 9/11. All these things are far more troubling for children than a bit of pr0n on the Internet.
So, short of shutting up children in some sort of tightly controlled, heavily censored environment (hmm, sounds like a jail), they will be exposed to bad stuff. Perhaps, instead of trying to shield our little darlings, we should instead be teaching them that the world is not always a nice place. We should be giving them the tools to deal with nastiness and worse. I think this is a far healthier approach to take -- as well as more practical.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
how likely is it that johnny is going to get a sexual image on the internet (likely http) unless he is explicityly looking for it?
You gotta be kidding.
Try doing a google on Britney Spears, and see how many celebrity porn sites show on the list.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This law allowed the government to withhold funds from any library not applying the appropriate filtering software, or having ineffective filtering software. All filtering software is incomplete meaning you could "prove" arbitrarily that any library or group of libraries is unworthy of Fed funds due to ineffective Web filtering software.
The filtering software also blocks educational/informational sites on things like: breast cancer, testicular cancer, tourism in Essex and Sussex, and sex education. Not to mention blocking adult content from adults.
The core of the law has good intentions (another brick to the road to Hell), but the legaleze is vague and inappropriate.
I've seen news stories locally (Baltimore) that claim this "requires libraries to allow pr0n surfing." Not so. Long before this law, most libraries have rules against such things, and still do. They also had a child internet area in view of a librarian's desk, and the adult area computers were off limits to ages 12 and under.
I think the children were being protected just fine by the libraries already. Maybe we should let them take care of their own business.
"If you go into a magazine store, it's not like they have Hustler out there along with everything else - instead, magazines like that are usually obscured by placards above which you can see the title, if that's what you're looking for. I think a mechanism similar to that is what is needed online - something of a barrier to child access, but doesn't require specific identification of the viewer (to protect privacy). It's not a simple issue, to be sure. There doesn't seem to be an obvious way to enact such barriers ("Click here if over 18" is a joke). "
How is "Don't remove this placard if under 18" any different from "Don't click here if under 18" ?? They're both the honor system. They can both be enforced by the watchful eye of a responsible adult, and they can both be defeated by the absence of such supervision.
Parents, if you don't want your kids to be exposed to materials on the internet you find objectionable, don't let them use the internet. Up until middle school, at the earliest, I don't see any reason why a child would NEED to use the internet. And by then they've probably seen/heard everything at their local public school.
And of course, parents who don't care what their children see are free to let them run wild.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Personally I think a lot of legislation forced down on children is entirely unfair, especially considering they have no vote or say in it. LIke I still thinks it's rediculous to have a drinking age of 21 but a smoking age of 18. I think that if kids are old enough to have an M16 tossed into their hands and told to go die for their country, they are old enough to have a couple of beers. Sexism is heavily frowned upon, and so is racism, why not ageism? Because all the policy makers are old and have forgotten what it's like to be young. It made me so angry when I was 18 and I signed up for a 20K loan to cover my first year of college. It made me angry I was old enough to put myself 20 thousand dollars in debt, but not old enough to drink certain kinds of beverages.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
On the other hand how do you propose to put an access control that won't violate anyones privacy?
<em>The court also said screening methods suggested by the government, including requiring Web-page viewers to give a credit card number, would unfairly require adults to identify themselves before viewing constitutionally protected material such as medical sites offering sex advice. </em>
That last issue seems like it will be the downfall of any access-control system. How do you both prove age while maintaining anonymity? They're mutually exclusive things.
>> Kids get curious around the age of 12 ..
And until that age they should be allowed to be children.
Making kids grow up too soon, and expecting them to be miniature adults when they're 5 or 6 is probably the most damaging thing you can do to them.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Which is it?
What makes people think a law like this will help to protect their children from pr0n on the internet. Even if a law is enacted within the united states, there is no way of them forcing this law on sites situated outside their borders. It would be completely useless
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
My position is that, as a (soon to be) parent, It is ME, NOT the owners of a adult Website, or anyone else for that matter, who should have the choice to allow or disallow what my kids view. The government should have the power to require websites to restrict their content FOR MINORS (and not a blanket censorship for all). If a parent, who thinks there is nothing wrong with allowing his/her kids to view such sites, there is nothing stopping them personally choosing to bypass the kiddie-restriction, on their heads be it, but this is still giving the parents the choice.... Giving the government this power, gives parents the power to choose.
T.
Once he's old enough to surf, he will be allowed to do so only when one parent is present, and we will limit the amount and types of websites he can view. Right now, he is allowed to use a laptop which is not connected to the internet (or to our own network), but which has many preschool educational games installed on it. I doubt he's feeling the lack.
If we are responsible for raising our children, then we're responsible for what they read, what they watch, what they surf. We can't expect the government to babysit our kids for us (hell, we can't even expect the government to babysit incarcerated criminals for us sometimes!) - we gave birth to them, essentially, we created new life. That carries a pretty hefty responsibility with it. Suck it up and stop asking Uncle Sam (or Uncle Jean in my case) to raise your kids for you. jmho
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Talk to any public school student and find out pretty quick how badly most teachers are neglecting their jobs.
You're correct.
Some of teachers do neglect to perform their duties with dedication we, the taxpaying public, expect of them.
<sarcasm>Given just how exorbitant the salaries are for teachers these days, I'm surprised that we have as many problems attracting competent teachers as we do.</saracasm>
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Common sense should be if a parent is going to let his or her child go on the internet they damn well better know any and all of what they are doing. Are you concerned when your child goes out and plays with little johnny who pulls out his older brothers playboy? Same shit different way.
How do you differentiate what is good for children to see or not? Huh? Would brittanyspears.com be banned? MTV with picts of her in skimpy clothes? Oh thats differnt thats pop culture.
Further more I let my teenage children use the Internet at the computer located smack dab in the middle of the family room. They want to go to the fringes of the net they can but I'll see it. At some point teenagers are going to be exposed to sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll (sorry, couldn't resist); despite the medium changes from the 50s, 60s and 70s the same old concerns live.
The point isn't that Click here if over 18 is a joke isn't ment to be a prevention, its a legal samantic. The point is the parents need to parent and it just doesn't happen these days. I see it in the parents of my childrens friends, good people that "just don't have the time". Bullshit, you want to procreate? You take all the responsibilty that comes with it.
The real crime in all of this is PISS POOR parenting. It is people with comments and thoughts like yours that let parents off the hook of responsibility.
Oh and news flash, i don't care if your kids are 2 or 20, they have seen more "unacceptable" shit in the world of everyday life than you can imagine. The Internet is hardly the highest on my concern list.
Bullshit, CENSORSHIP DOESN'T WORK!!! Period! End of discussion. It never has and never will.
Are there any studies that demonstrate that occasionally stumbling on adult content can damage a child? It seems far-fetched to me.
Something has to be done to give parents a fighting chance, however. Chances are that most kids are going to be more adept at using the computer than their parents, resulting in either ineffective monitoring by the parent or evasion of monitoring by kids.
:)
Well call me naive, or maybe European (which I am), but I'm still wondering what is so wrong with kids occasionaly seeing naked people.
Really. Is there any proof that children that have seen sexual scens turn out to be dangerous criminals, perverts, or worse Polticians ?
In my contry we still have adult magazins right next to the "standard" magazins in shops. Children are exposed to these as well as on TV, even in the lamest Ad for shampoo you have naked women and such. And any kid that that is looking for some "exposure" only has to wait for some weekends late night (23h-1am) movies.
I'm still pretty sure that all the fuss about p0rn comes from the lack of knowledge of it. It's like most things in life. If it's forbiden then you will damn well try to get it. How hard is it for parents to simply explain to their kid what sex is, why their are porno magazins, and hence why their are porno Sites on the net.
I mean, my parents did it, and although they are in my mind Uber parents, I'm sure a lot of others have done it too.
Murphy(c)
Oh and by the way I haven't turned out to be a child rapist or pervert.... yet.
Chances are that most kids are going to be more adept at using the computer than their parents, resulting in either ineffective monitoring by the parent or evasion of monitoring by kids.
In as few as 30 years, the ruling class will be made up largely by people who grew up with computers - and there has never been an oppressed community (the net-savvy) whose distinguishing charachteristic (the internet) acted directly as such a powerful organizing tool.
Mark my words - within our lifetimes, it will become impossible for this kind of fascist bullshit to get pushed through government, and computer law will make sense. Maybe this is already happening.
In the meantime, parents who want "a fighting chance" should take note: drop the "I am not a computer person" attitude and learn what your kids already know about the internet. It actually takes less effort to do this than it takes to whine about your problems to the government. And your kids will be overjoyed at the chance to teach you something!
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
Freedom of speech is a bitch, isn't it? Freedom of speech means that I am going to hear/read/see things that I find offensive (like your little hissy-fit) and you are going to see/read/hear things that you find offensive (like me mocking you). But that's the price we pay for the ability to speak our minds.
There have always been and shall always be those who abuse the system, who push the limits too far. But does that mean we have to give up our rights and freedoms because of these assholes? You woiuld surrender your freedoms that easily?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Common sense would dictate that you would spend more time controlling what content your child accesses. You can quite easily set up a rule in most e-mail programs to block e-mails that are not from a specific list of allowed addresses. YOUR refusal to educate yourself on controlling YOUR child's access to materials YOU find offensive is not MY problem.
However, if you insist that it become MY problem, then you have no room to compain when I smack your kid on the head to shut them the hell up when they're acting like little bastards in a restaurant and interrupting my meal. Do you have a problem with THAT too?
I've been called a "Fucking Dick" by better people than you.
If you had a daughter (maybe one whose private parts are being leered at in darkened bedrooms around the world), you might have a different idea about what consitutes free speech, and what is abuse!
That's not what COPA was designed to prevent. Pornography of that nature is most certainly illegal already. No one in their right mind would approve of that kind of pornography. On the other hand, COPA was designed to give the government leeway to overly regulate legal pornography businesses by taking over a parent's responsibility. If you can't be responsible enough to watch over your children, then you shouldn't come and complain to the government because they didn't do your job.
Legislating morality is a dangerous precedent to set, and I think that decisions regarding legal pornography should be made by adults, and the government should stay out of parenting. Don't want your kids viewing pornography? Then either put the computer in a high-traffic area in the house or having some sort of monitoring. Or, more importantly, teach your kids the proper way to use the Internet. Of course, it's much easier these days to just let kids surf the Internet at will, and that's the parent's fault. I'll say it again: it's a parent's responsibility to look out for their kids.
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