Ohio Net Censorship Law Struck Down

rfc1394 writes "C|Net reports that a federal judge has struck down as unconstitutional a portion of an Ohio statute which attempted to prevent minors from seeing material which would be 'harmful' to them, but was so overbroad that it would have covered a considerable amount of material which is legal for adults to view. Basically, if a website operator had reason to believe the material they were showing was visible to minors, and if the material was considered to be harmful to them, they would be in violation of the law. Since about 1/6 of the users of the Internet are minors, it's trivial to argue that anyone running a website would be aware that the material they have is visible to minors even if they had no intention of doing so."

Comments

40.7%, actually

[PlatyPaul]

Here's a breakdown of users hitting Google by age group:

1. 50 and older: 47 million.
2. 35-49: 42.5 million.
3. 17 and under: 30.3 million.
4. 25-34: 19.9 million.
5. 18-24: 11.2 million.

So that makes it approximately 40.7% of the Internet population composed of minors (assuming that the breakdown that Google shows is accurate, and that we can reasonably extrapolate their data with only small introduced error, while their data itself may itself be extrapolated from a smaller pool).

The numbers are from here, though that's just referencing the statistics brought up in the article "Google vs. Justice: Privacy, Pornography, Secrets" by Lauren Etter (The Wall Street Journal, 18-19 March 2006, A7).

Re:40.7%, actually

[turtledawn]

How are you defining minor? 18 year olds are not minors in very many countries and certainly not in the US. I came up with 20.1% using the numbers provided.

I smell....a troll!

[Mr. Underbridge]

As a pro feminist, I was in favor of the law. We really need to get rid of pornography. It is degrading to women and it severely cripples the feminist movement. Pornography is not an art form. It does not deserve protection. It is indecent and vile. It is time to "clean up the tubes." I am a shareholder of Time Warner. I have submitted a proposal for voting at the next shareholder meeting for Time Warner to only allow access to whitelisted sites by default and eventually become mandatory.

*sniff sniff sniff*....I smell...*sniff sniff*....a troll!!!!!

Clues that this was a troll:

• Reference to tubes: Very nice, get a poke at Stevens while you're trolling.
• Proposal for mandatory global whitelisting: nobody's that dumb.
• Feminist on slashdot: How many actual women are on slashdot?
• Posted AC.
• Sig: who puts an actual sig in an AC post...except a troll?
• Sig: a sig that has a link to Madonna in a feminist post...compared to a programming language? Hmmm....

Great troll, by the way.

Re:1/6?

[garcia]

According to the shitty links here (United States' Internet usage) and here (users aged 3-17) it says that there are 232,655,287 users in the US total and the 34.3 million aged 3-17. That's about 13% and the article is quoting a little higher than that at ~16.5%

Whatever.

Re:What happens - DMCA

[benfinkel]

I believe there are two currently recognized standards that the federal government can invoke to restrict free speech:

The Clear and Present Danger standard, which is the trickier of the two, and the Time, Place, and Manner standard, which is more often invoked.

An example of clear and present danger would be the old "yelling fire in a crowded theater" gag, since it that speech can reasonably be expected to cause a clear and present danger to those around you.

The time, place, and manner standard is what would be invoked to prevent you from say, holding a loud protest down a suburban street at 2 AM when people in their homes would be trying to sleep.