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Ohio Net Censorship Law Struck Down

Posted by Zonk on from the there-are-internets-outside-of-ohio dept.

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."

2 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. 1/6? by Mursk · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Where did that 1/6 figure come from? The article seems to use it just to give an example, while the summary seems to quote it as fact.

    I know, I know, I must be new here. But does anyone happen to have any more reliable statistics?

    --
    "This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
  2. in all my life by epine · · Score: 4, Interesting


    In all my life I've never seen a scientific study about what kind of content has the potential to harm children and why. I'm sure most of my adult peers managed to expose themselves to harmful content as children. Only the least enterprising children fail to accomplish this. And what is the end result? We're all convinced we came out fine, by the skin of our teeth, but the next child won't? What exactly was impared? Our gullibility? Our willingness to vote morons into power?

    Obviously there are some children who are adversely affected by coverage of the real world on the six o'clock news. But I have a feeling this bill is not targetted at that content.