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.

Comments

Way to Go Absentee Parents!

[Talking Goat]

Finally, a decision. Now will parents stop pushing legislation and start monitoring their children's online activities? No, they'll just push another bill. But at least we have a precedent, again... Wait, what was the point of a precedent? Apparently, parents haven't caught on yet.

Re:Way to Go Absentee Parents!

[TopShelf]

You, obviously, are not a parent. It's not like you spend time raising your children and teaching them right from wrong, and only then do you allow them to be exposed to the wide world, wherein they will be guided by your paternal wisdom.

Common sense dictates that some standards need to be put in place, whether commercial or legislative. 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). But something needs to be done. Personally, I think the spam side is worse than the web browsing. Spam arrives indiscriminately, whereas browsing requires more intent.

Re:Way to Go Absentee Parents!

[cHiphead]

I think a .xxx for any material worse than Playboy would be a good 'standard' for the internet, but not legislated. Or just force them all to use Usenet. If a kid can learn to navigate newsgroups, he's probably smart enough to mentally deal with porn (but that's probably just me). ;)

It should be interesting to see just what kind of timetable it takes my son to get into such things. I'm surely going to be running filters and blockers of some sort while he's really young. Haven't really looked into yet (got a few years and hope to keep him OUTSIDE instead of stuck inside in front of a screen going blind like his father)

Re:Way to Go Absentee Parents!

[kwerle]

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.

That's an excellent example. Let's look at it:
The porn mag is in a public place. There is some amount of public pressure for youths NOT to look at porn (in public). If you don't think so, consider how much more porn is viewed in the private of the internet vs. the public of the magazine shop.
The owner of the store with the porn mag is financially responsible. If they let youths view the mags, they can be found guilty of (insert your decency law here) and fined/jailed. [so, no, the placard is not "just the honor system" - it is a legal barrier the proprieter needs to keep from getting fined/jailed]
In most areas, porn mags are limited in what they can show. Some places more than others. Not so, the internet - one browser gets you whatever you want.
Porn mags do not arrive, uninvited, in your mail. If they did, the senders would be fined/jailed.

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.

If, by that, you mean that neither can be enforced except by an adult that never leaves their children's side, then I guess you're right. If you mean anything else, I guess you're wrong.

Complexities inherent in this issue

[Dukeofshadows]

Some people will define "protecting" children by different means. The Christian Right around here would deny children access to everything they don't agree with, cinluding evolutionary textbooks since they might "corrupt" their kids. Other people will take their 7-year-olds to go see Robocop or the Rocky Horror Picture Show for the hell of it. Trying to protect children requires good parenting first and foremost, not just overly protective laws. Public schools are trickiest of all since so many ready-to-litigate families have different concerns for their kids. I think the easiest solution would be to either have all of the computers monitored by a faculty member. Maybe they could also tell the kids well in advance that their activities will be monitored with justification neccessary for visiting sites deemed "questionable". Granted, that system could be abused and not all kids need protection, but for Johnny trying to e-mail the president and instead visiting a .com instead of a .gov (whitehouse.com is a notorious porn site), some measure of protection should be in place.

Online porn

[tonywestonuk]

One reason that I would think twice about letting my kids (if I had them) use the net would be for the amount of accessible porn, and the like that is so freely, and easily available. Over a certain age (15 maybe, maybe more) then anything goes, but, as it stands, I can click on a page within a presumably benign google search, and be presented with something that isn't. Allowing sites to show 'information inappropriate for minors' to minors is like selling kids top shelf mags, or allowing them in to the movies see uk cert 18 movies.
I'm completely against censorship to those of us who have arrived at adulthood, but saying that kids should be allowed to view adult material because of 'free speech' is wrong.

T.

Re:Online porn

[kryptkpr]

No, it's not wrong.

What's all this bullshit about shielding the children anyways? The children don't need, nor want your shielding.

I'm not saying we should starting selling pr0n in all elementary schools world wide, but kids are going to have sex. They're going to look at other, naked, kids or adults or whatever. They're going to be curious; this is what kids do.

So instead of shielding your [proverbial] kids from the "horrors" of porn, how about educating them instead?

There is such a thing as tasteful porn (that doesn't involve anal sex followed by the guy blowing his load all over the girl's face .. that should be saved for their mid-late teens, but if they really want it, how the hell are we going to stop them?).

STOP LYING TO YOUR KIDS.

Don't make them grow up in an imaginary world you've built for them.. They will be totally unprepared for the real horrors, or the real world. Your job as a parent is to educate your kids as to what is [relatively] right and [relatively] wrong. Don't be afraid of sex, it's not wrong, and it doesn't have to be dirty (I still remember the first pr0n pic I downloaded from a local BBS, it was a girl who had a sweater on, the kind with lots of holes in it, and you could ALMOST SEE A NIPPLE! me and my friends were amazed. This was more then enough for us.)

Kids get curious around the age of 12 .. waiting until they're 21, 18, or even 15, is FAR TOO LATE. If you don't educate your kids, the world will, and the world isn't a very caring, nor loving teacher.

Re:Online porn

[stratjakt]

I agree with the parent. Kids shouldnt be allowed to view adult material, and it really shouldn't require anything but some common sense and good faith from the web community to prevent it. But that good faith doesnt exist.

I built a PC for each of my children, for their rooms to do whatever they want with. I dont want to have to sit over their shoulders and watch them constantly, because I want them to be able to learn the computer the way I did, by just screwing around on it. I want them to be independent and learn from doing, like I did.

So I set up a proxy for them, with PICS filtering and other 'standards' (squid and dansguardian, OT: anyone know how to transparently proxy with dansguardian?. The idea was it would make a good enough whitelist.

Now, I'm more worried about the kids finding a pokemon chat room and being stalked by some pedophile than I am about them accidentally seeing a boob.

cartoonnetwork.com has a really cool (kid speaking) c-toon trading game my one kid loves. You watch TV on fridays and they give out codes, which you punch in to the website, to get c-toon cards, and then can play a card game (pokemon like) online with other kids. Whats great about it is that there's absolutely no way for personal information to get across. You dont pick a username, it presents a list of made-up silly names that you choose. You cant chat, you can pick from lists of prewritten phrases. (So no trolls posting ascii goatse)

Anyways, back on topic. I've noticed that some pricks out there put fake PICS and other codes into their porn websites. IMO it's a pretty contemptable way to make another nickel or two off of their banners. Its also IMO criminal, since they're basically marking the content as a childrens site, which is like sticking copies of Hustler into kids hallowe'en bags.

Meh anyways. I dont know what my point is. Some people are just pricks. We wouldnt need laws if they werent. Personally I'm in favor of the kids.us domain, I think it's the best compromise. It gives parents a very simple way to whitelist for younger children. It would be nice if it didnt have to be mandated by government, but if you left the registrars to regulate it, well, they wouldnt.

Re:I propose a new law

[stratjakt]

So it would be better if our tax dollars funded every whiners agenda?

For every 'just' cause citizens take in court, there are three hundred frivolous ones.

The ACLU is hell-bent on making sure noone ever says the word 'God', or celebrates Christmas in public. I don't want to fund that bullshit with my tax dollars.

And if the RIAA gets the "Freedom to listen to whatever the hell you want Act" overturned in Supreme Court, do you want your tax dollars reimbursing them?

Re:Meta tag

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Because then it will be up to the author of the Web page to decide what constitutes "adult material," and if he guesses wrong, he goes to prison.

In some cases, it's obvious: porn site operators and the proprietors of sites like rotten.com would be idiots if they didn't use the tags. But there's a huge gray area. Is my personal home page "adult" because it contains a few four-letter words? I don't think so -- but some prosecutor, somewhere, might, and then I've got big problems. What about medical sites which, by their nature, include detailed discussions of human anatomy?

I wouldn't object at all to the creation of a standard (I'd rather have it done by the W3C or some other private entity than the government, but whatever) for "opt-in" kid-safe sites: a clearly published set of rules that says, "If your site does not contain any of the following [naked people / dirty words / etc.] then you are authorized to use this tag." Then the more extreme censorware could look for this tag.

I would still object to public libraries and the like being required to block stuff that doesn't contain the tag, for all kinds of reasons, but it would be a start.

Why should one need to give out CC#???

[moncyb]

From the article:

...including requiring Web-page viewers to give a credit card number, would unfairly require adults to identify themselves before viewing...

This is much more of a problem than just "violating" your privacy by identifying yourself. There is a real risk of credit card fraud here. Anyone remember the stories about the so called "free" pr0n sites asking for a CC# (under this law) so they could verify age, then charging the person's card because they put a clause somewhere in the fine print?

Would you really want to give out your CC# to every site which has "PG" "PG-13", or "R" rated content? That's probably half the sites on the internet. This is a stupid law. IIRC this is the law where the same standard also applies to any site which you can post messages or give out personal information. (Right now they just require playing with cookies) There goes the other half.

hm...

[themusicgod1]

"Don't let your kids have their own PC until they can buy one on their own."
computers are cheap if you aren't so elitist-if you pointed your nose just a little below the horizon you'd see you can get most 386's for free and computers less than that for free. cheap 486's can range below 100$[canadian] to near 25$[canadian] for used...I think i had 5 computers running at one time not to long ago, and i paid 20$[canadian] for the whole hardware setup [mostly, one 3com ISA NIC card]. A more reasonable alternative may be 'when they are old enough to know how to configure their computer to attatch to the family hub/router/network/Modem, then they may view whatever they please. That would have stopped me -- most of the time that i lived at home my computer was about to be connected 'Real Soon' -- but due to problems with the process i was having trouble. Besides that, if they fuck up a free computer with virii [not mind you that most computer virii work on anything less than windows 95 anyway...i can't speak for low levels of Linux...]...

hell, if they are smart enough to get that far, chances are they are smart enough to bypass whatever else you can throw at them [honestly]...and this is supposing there is content you wouldn't trust them with in the first place...

as for myself, i showed my dad the Usenet [he didn't realized it existed...] IMAGINE THE PORN i pointed out...! i shared :P. and what are we trying to censor, anyway, and why? are we trying to protect them from strangers? teach them to be strong. teach them how to use a weapon [firearm and or pointed edge]. my parents threw me in martial arts lessons at a young age...if i were to come across my '10 years younger' self i wouldn't mess with him even if i had a knife on me. there are scary people in the Real World - deal with it.