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Pennsylvania Child Porn Act Overturned
Ghoser777 writes "According to MSNBC, a Pennsylvanian law that required ISPs to filter/block websites containing child porn has been overturned by a federal judge. Child porn is still illegal under U.S. federal law, but the judge found that 'there is an abundance of evidence that implementation of the Act has resulted in massive suppression of speech protected by the First Amendment.'"
If you run an ISP, and are worried about some government agency forcing you to sacrifice your subscibers rights, heres a good place to start to learn about the latest battles. http://www.eff.org/minilinks/archives/cat_free_spe ech.php
Not quite on-topic, but I seem to recall that Pa. is the place to which people who'd been bothered for not accepting their local religion went to avoid persecution...?
If so, I'd say it's for the best that this law's overturning might help reduce the loss of access to ideas, that may have been (inadvertantly) suppressed.
and i wonder which states
will create a similar law forcing isp's to filter out unknown crap as a result of this overturn getting press
as much as i hate tyranicall despots,
i so long for a time when one genius
made all the laws, and they made sense
Wow, this is certainly a step in the positive direction, in view of stuff like Patriot Act, and RIAA's ...
At least someone in that court room still remember that Americans possess this thing called rights. While decisions like this probably won't stand against the corporate giants, at least 1984 has been postponed yet further..
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
I wonder if you could legally view child pornography if you classified it as part of the belief of a religion.
I'm not sayin', but I'm sayin'.
Secondly, I wonder if the law had passed if ISPs would have done anything about FreeNet.
My personal stance on the issue is manage it on a regional basis, if your country/state/city feels strongly enough about the issue they can ban the internet completely if it is voted on, and people not in the area are unaffected. As long as no legitimate content (eg "speech") is censored or blocked, there should be no problem with it. Hell, put a switch on every new PC saying "child pornography - ON/OFF" and let the consumers decide for themselves, instead of legislating it to high heaven.
Let's face it, these child pornogrophers are always going to be releasing their stuff, it is up to the people weather they want to watch it or something made by more mature people. Simple as that.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
As far as the big "legit" things that cannot be blocked, how about such pecadillos as political speech, expressions of self-determination, and journalistic reporting (including whistleblowing)? People can, will, and do have tremendous difficulties when barriers to these factors are raised. The benefits to society of enforcing free speech are so much greater than the threat posed by child porn, by any realistic measure, that I really don't see your objection.
Well, I guess the are gonna be happy. *OUCH* - ducks for cover.
I wonder if you could legally view child pornography if you classified it as part of the belief of a religion.
1.Child Porn images (not photos) were attempted to be made illegal by congress, but judges ruled that was making an idea illegal, which is unconstitutional; so all ancient(ie pre-photo) Hindu sex images are legal.
2.Whatever is in general practice CONTINUES to be allowed whether slavery when freedom for all is declared or cutting the foreskin off infants (the genital mutilation of OUR culture) when taking pictures of nude babies genitals is considered cause to call the police.
3. People created new religions declaring various drug use to be sacred, but the courts have only accepted old established (including American Indian) religious activities as privaleged (needing extra special reasons to be outlawed, not just legislative whim); thus some Indian tribes legally use otherwise illegal mushrooms, Christian drinking of wine-turned-into-blood is legal regardless of laws to the contrary (such as being under age), and so on.
4."[Herodotus recounts that] Darius once asked some Greeks what would induce them to devour the dead bodies of their parents, and when they answered in horror that nothing could make them do an act so atrocious, he had some men from India brought in whose custom it was to do this very thing. He asked [the men from India] how they could be persuaded to burn their dead instead of eating them. They cried out in abhorrence and begged him not to utter such abominable words. 'As Pindar says,' concludes Herodotus, 'custom is king.' Edith Hamilton, The Great Age of Greek Literature (http://www.cstone.net/~irksome/Z.htm)
While it wasn't your main point and I don't know if you were arguing for it or not, the fact that arresting marijuana users would get 50% of college students arrested and punishing music downloaders would get 80% of college students in trouble should set off an alarm in anyone's head that maybe the law needs to be re-evaluated. (Not necessarily dropped, but definitely re-evaluated.)
Closer to topic, your desire for more government monitoring is scary. But also not the point, and I won't argue it.
(The following is obviously speculation, so if you have facts to refute or support it, I'm all ears.)
Actually on-topic, while the whole child porn thing is disgusting, stopping internet sharing of it is not going to stop the abuse of the children the law aims to protect. The people who do this aren't doing it because they can make money doing it. They're going to be making the porn for themselves whether they can sell it and share it or not. The people consuming it aren't going to stop molesting children if they can't get their dirty pictures.
I'm willing to bet that the number of kids helped by this law is going to be within the margin of butterfly-effects, so let's not waste time and money blocking people from reading melodramatic blogs.
There are better ways to fight child abuse, and they conflict with this one.
No one is ignoring the problem. The issue here is the method used rather than the objective. If the method had stopped child porn there would not be a problem and the method would continue but the method did not do what it was meant to do. It block hundreds more sites than those it could legitemately target and therefore was blatently not working.
If it had effectively blocked just the child porn I would be screaming how wrong this was, if it had only affected a couple of other sites I would still support it but it took down hundreds (probably thousands) of legitimate sites and was therefore not legitimate.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Read the comments with Traci Lords in mind and most of the comments become nonsense.
"Child Porn" is NOT legally what most of you think it is. Some think its any nude of a child. It is not. Some think the child's genitals must be nude/visible to be legally porn - NOPE (not in the USA). Some think the child must look like a child - no again, look at a Traci Lords photo at age 17 (illegal in USA, I THINK legal in Germany).
Pictures of naked children are NOT child porn unless they are posing in a lascivious manner. Webcams of 15 year old girls flashing is NOT child porn. Very important to understand that.
Either way that is not the vast majority of child porn. Most child porn is still created by adults and from the articles I've read a lot of it is from Eastern Europe. For every one or two topless pictures of a teenage girlfriend there are probably a million pictures of illegal sex acts with very little girls.
Thank you for reminding us to deal with the problem instead of the symptom.
My understanding of people with obsession and compulsion towards _any_ type of porn is that the impetus stems from an inappropriate exposure to the subject matter during some formative period in a person's life. That "inappropriate exposure" can take many forms -- from the extreme (rape), "commonplace" (sexual experiences at too young an age), or subtle/obscure (a sensitive person being rebuked for normal sexuality by an authority figure with dysfunctional boundaries).
Obviously, these can be dealt with through education, just like the sources of drug abuse, but it's a tough nut to crack, especially in a covertly repressed society like the U.S.
I fully agree with the parent poster and think our society would make progress if these source topics were discussed more openly rather than simply clamp down on the symptom. This is just one of those difficult realms of human social development, and it will continue to be difficult and slow gaining until we expose these issues to the light of day without harse, immature judgment and prejudice.