Challenging the Child Online Protection Act

narramissic writes, "Today in Philadelphia a federal trial got underway that will decide whether COPA is constitutional. The outcome will determine whether operators of Web sites can be held accountable for failing to block children's access to inappropriate materials. An article on ITworld outlines the arguments of the foes in the battle: the DOJ and the ACLU. If I were a betting woman, I'd put my money on the ACLU. Parents, schools, etc. have to take responsibility for the internet usage of children in their charge." Two courts have found COPA unconstitutional and the Supreme Court has upheld the ban on its enforcement, while asking a lower court to examine whether technological measures such as filtering could be as effective as the law in shielding children; thus this trial. The article does not mention that it was the DOJ's preparation for the trial that was behind its earlier request that search companies turn over their records — a request that only Google refused.

Comments

I'll just say it in advance

[TubeSteak]

Comment 1: Think of the children
Comment 2: It's the parents job to police their kids
Comment 3: Parents can't police all the time

Just call this a meta-post so that we can get the generic comments out of the way.

The name is wrong...

[zappepcs]

This, even if enforced, will not protect children from themselves, or the unscrupulous... it will, however, give polititians someone to roast on an open fire to make them look good in election years.... This should be the VFMA (vote for me act) as that is how it will be used, like many other bad laws in the US

nanny state

[User 956]

Parents, schools, etc. have to take responsibility for the internet usage of children in their charge.

Why is it that the ACLU has to fight in court to get people to understand something that should be painfully obvious? Man up people, the government is not your mommy.

Re:nanny state

[Anonymous Coward]

I also don't want my kids buying alcohol, cigarettes or porn. I cannot be there with them every time they are in a store. I rely on the law to prevent the clerk from selling them these things.

If you can't trust your kid to obey the simple rules, by what right do you allow them to travel unescorted in public? You can and must be there every time your kid is unescorted by an adult; until such time as that child is old enough to be responsible for their own behaviour.

It's no one else's job to enforce your personal little taboos. Maybe you think women need to have their heads covered with scarves, and that your children shouldn't have to see women with their heads bared. Maybe you don't think they should hear anything aside from your religious beliefs. Maybe you want to indoctrinate them in any one of a thousand different ways.

Tough. Other people have rights, too. It's called free speech. If you don't want your young kids in a porn store, keep an eye on them until they're old enough to decide if they want to go in on their own. Once they're an adult, they get the right to make their own decisions. Until then, *you* have to take responsibility for their decisions.

COPA is pointless

[springbox]

I can see that there were some "good intentions" to protect children or whatever the case might have been, but if you've seen most web sites with a COPA agreement (phpBB in particular), as a registering user, you have two choices:

"I am under 13"
"I am 13 or older."

Ok great! Now only the honest kids will be prevented from signing up to most forums. It's about as ridiculous as the "YES, I'm 18 or older" on adult pr0n sites.

It would seem as if COPA is only protecting the site operators in the event that something bad DOES happen to young childern. These kids can still get themselves into trouble if they want. I guess some people think that the fancy agreement is somehow significant (as seen in EULAs.)

Re:What is Inappropriate?

[Maxo-Texas]

What about string bikini pics.

What about bikini pics that you can make out anatomy through (oh wait, JC Penneys add three months ago had that and it ran in the newspaper too).

What about a lady in a full corset & stockings (that cover more than the bikini). ...holding a banana ...holding a zuchinni ...holding a vibrator ...holding a realistic dildo ...holding a real guy. ...with just a hint of her aereola showing. ...with the top half showing. ...with nipples. ...oh wait, it's really a male transexual (male nipples being legal) ...but he's in a corset. ...but that was fine for Tim Curry

Someone else said it best here in the past.

PLEASE post a web page with a continuam of pictures from fully appropriate to fully inappropriate with each one flagged as to how appropriate or inappropriate it is. That way we can all go to it and see what is an is not appropriate to have on the web.

No, COPA is working as designed.

[Tackhead]

> From a purely technical standpoint, these 'children protection' things are total bullshit. I remember faking my age all the time before I was 13 to get around those acts.

DOS: No serial number required.
95/98/SE: To cut down on casual piracy, enter this serial number.
Win2K: Since that didn't work, it might phone home unless you ask nicely that it not phone home.
XP: Since that didn't work, it won't activate until you let it phone home. Don't worry, we won't nuke existing installations.
Vista: Since that didn't work, we'll nuke any box that stops phoning.

Or if we're talking copyright - witness the evolution of the NET Act ("It's a crime if you sell it"), the DMCA ("It's a crime if you crack DRM"), and the attempt to pass something harsher (SSSCA/CBDTPA) a few years later. (Look for another attempt after the elections, and/or something to mandate DRM into the hardware specifications, as Vista takes hold in the marketplace and is once again cracked...)

COPA was designed to ensure that under-12 kids could get Myspace pages, that under-18 kids can click "I'm over 18" to see b00bies, and that (not legally required, but I've seen it on many brewery/winery/distillery pages) under-21 people can click "I'm over 21" to read about booze.

After a few years, and after enough "horror stories" have appeared in the press about how 11-year-olds are being victimized on Myspace, 15-year-olds are seeing teh b00bies, and underage drinkers are able to read about beer, legislators will have a wide selection ready-made excuses to come up with some sort of "Real ID" or single-signon system for the Intertubes.

The courts only decide whether or not something's constitutional. Until they do so, it is constitutional. When the courts strike down COPA, it will be replaced by something even worse.

HOW ABOUT PROTECT ME FROM THE CHILDREN

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to know what is being done to protect adults FROM children. False allegations, false accusations, baiting, online deception, vandalism, slander, and the like.

I spent two years in prison for some bullshit some kid said on me, and I had to not only prove it was impossible, but had to hire a lawyer to find a technicality in the trial to say the trial was bogus. Otherwise, without having a family on the outside with a little bit of money, I would be rotting in prison today. Go ahead, tell me children don't lie about being molested. Go ahead, tell me children don't lie. Go ahead, tell me! I will look you dead in the eye and tell you how full of **** you are.

I bristle with anger whenever anybody does anything in the name of "protecting the children". These laws are being used to go on the equivalent of modern day witch hunts. Don't believe it? Wait until they come after you, and you're in front of a jury stating as plainly as possible, how what they are saying makes absolutely no sane common sense. It doesn't matter. The jury has been cherry picked jury of neo-conservative republicans. You'd get a much fairer jury if you stood outside Walmart and grabbed the first 13 people that walked in or out the door. When has any defendant ever had any say so or oversite in the picking of a jury? Answer: NEVER. Think about that. That's why America is so corrupt, its why everyone pleads out, its why you have the right to a jury trial in name only.

I think any person who wants to protect children, needs to start by granting children more basic human rights. For one thing, to be considered as citizens of the country, and not property of their parents. To be given a say so in the development and passing of the laws under which they have to live under. To have the voluntary right to opt out of schools, which have become indoctrination camps to teach people to jump when they are told.

There is no freedom in this country. You have freedom of mobility, and that's about it (and you have that anywhere). How many of the hundreds of thousands of laws on the books have you ever had any chance to vote on, ever been asked to vote on. How many of these bogus laws ever come up from review? Never. That's why there are ludicrous laws still on the book about not spitting from your donkey on the sidewalk in front of a lady during daylight hours.

These laws are passed in some place far away in a room by a select group of people and then applied nationwide to the majority, who are too busy with their own lives struggling to make ends meet to travel to find these backrooms and stand up (even though they wouldn't be let in the door).

Re:Check out Bush's wrongdoing!

[Bugs42]

Why oh why can't we have a mod option for -1, Has No Contact With Reality?

How is this different that TV?

[queenb**ch]

With Cable TV, you have the ability to set your television set to block specific channels - thinks like Skinamax, Spice, etc. These channels aren't automatically blocked. The parent has to sit down with the remote control and program it. I don't see why the internet should be filtered for the rest of us, because parents are too lazy to look over Little Johnny's shoulder and tell him to say off the warez site with the nasty ads.

If you want the internet filtered for your kid, install and manage your own filtering software. It's the parent's responsibility to take charge of what their children are doing, viewing, etc. It's not the content provider's problem at all, particular on a medium like the internet where you have no face to face interaction (e.g. checking ID). Frankly, if you require a valid credit card, I think you'd solve the whole issue.

My objection lies with of some of the banner ads and emails, which can be really atrocious. From time to time, I get things in my Inbox that make me cringe and wish I would remove them from my brain. "Barnyard" and "hot lovin'" should NEVER appear in the same sentence. I can only imagine something like that coming to a small child....

2 cents,

QueenB

Re:How is this different that TV?

[shmlco]

"I can only imagine something like that coming to a small child...."

Half would say "ewwww" and half would start laughing, then they'd all turn on the TV or go out and play. Kids are not as fragile as we make them out to be, and most are terribly uninterested in all of that icky adult stuff.

Or to quote, "Stop. They're KISSING again. Go on to the fire swamp, that sounded good..."

Re:Comment 4:

[Anonymous Coward]

Gah, kids don't spontaneously explode if they don't wear a helmet while tricycling.

You're clearly not rigging the detonators properly.

Re:I can see a big problem here

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Let's say - if kid wants to register for this kind of page it needs to be done by adult. How? Simple. Bu using credit card.

You're out of date. More and more minors are getting credit cards.

Of course there's a problem - less kids registered - means less income.

If you're talking about kids and porn sites, you're way off. Do you know anyone in the porn business? Kids don't have a lot of money but do have time. Kids don't like to create records of porn viewing and don't want anyone to be able to track them. They are the least likely to pay any money of all demographics. Do you know what is really bad for a porn business? Publicity. Clients like to be anonymous because of the social stigma. One case of parents catching kids using a site can cause a huge hubbub and lose them a lot of business as their clients move elsewhere to avoid any possible publicity.

Most porn cites would be very happy to have a way to stop kids from visiting their sites. It would be good for business. Most porn cites voluntarily submit their names to parental controls lists and the major ones even help fund a consolidated database to make it easier for the industry to have good listings. They also tend to use good keywords to help search cites accurately mark them as adult. Less registered kids means more income and less liability, not less income.

Re:Obligatory

[Nephilium]

One of my favorite "Think of the children" quotes...

Rule 1: When someone talks about 'the children' watch out for your wallet.
Rule 2: When someone talks about 'the children' watch out for your freedoms.
And now, it seems:
Rule 3: When someone talks about 'the children' watch out for your democracy.

- Andrew Stuttaford

Nephilium

What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a spot of poetry in them, cluttering and wasting a second-string planet near a third-string star. But sometimes they finish in style. -- Potiphar (Potty) Breen in The Year of the Jackpot

BIG nit:

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The courts only decide whether or not something's constitutional. Until they do so, it is constitutional.

Sorry, no cigar.

IF the court declares something unconstitutional, it was ALWAYS unconstitutional. It "didn't exist". Get out of jail free, etc.

Not that it matters a whole lot. The problem is fourfold:

  1) Until the court throws the law out, you have no idea whether it will.

  2) Neither does the rest of the legal system. So it still goes after you. "Get out of jail free." doesn't refund your bondsman's fee, your lawyer's fee, replace your lost chunk of lifetime, reassemble the broken family, get you your job back - with back pay, replace your repossessed house and car, restore your credit rating, replace the expensive collectable guns you had to dispose of, fill in the hole in your resume, etc. It does purge the criminal record - which doesn't help you if the info is already out in hundreds of non-court databases. And even if they knew damned well this one would get thrown out you have no way to sue them. "I vas Chust Dooink my Chob!"

  3) The courts normally don't even take up the issue until somebody gets convicted of violating the law in question AND there's NO other way to dispose of the case without addressing the issue. Even then it takes the Supreme Court to definitively strike a new law, and they can arbitrarily refuse to even hear it - which they usually will do unless two appellate courts disagree, and sometimes even then.

and...

When the courts strike down COPA, it will be replaced by something even worse.

4) It takes a LOT of time and work to strike a law. It takes the legislators and chief exec very little time and work to pass another like it, with slight tweaks.

And another. And another. And another dozen. And another thousand. And put riders on every "must-pass" bill, like the budget, or a use-of-force authorization, or ...