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

Again and again...

[gillbates]

Legislators draft laws in an effort to appear "Tough on crime" or to "Protect the children", knowing full well that they won't pass the muster of the courts.

Why do they do this?

It's political posturing, nothing more. The laws passed are so vague that they could not possibly stand up to the scrutiny of established case law, much less Constitutional questions. It's an old trick, by which the politician can say to his constituents, "Look! I passed laws to protect children, but that darned Supreme Court struck them down..." By trade, most politicians are lawyers, so they can draft legislation which they know is contrary to established Constitutional and case law and will be struck down. But they get the benefit of the public belief that they are doing something about the child-porn bogey man.

And what happens? We on /. make much of laws which were never intended to be enforced.

But what happens when one of these vague laws is enforced, and found not vague enough to be declared unconstitutional? Or the accused can't afford a good lawyer?