COPA Suffers Yet Another Court Defeat

A US federal appeals court today struck down COPA, the Child Online Protection Act, a Clinton-era censorship law that the Justice Department has been struggling to get implemented for a decade. (The ACLU filed suit as soon as COPA was signed in 1998 and won an immediate injunction.) The battle has made it to the Supreme Court twice, and the DoJ has essentially never gotten any satisfaction out of the courts. This was the case for which the DoJ famously went trolling for search histories. In the ruling issued today, the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower-court ruling that COPA violates the First Amendment because it is not the most effective way to keep children from visiting adult Web sites. The law would require sites to check visitors' ages, e.g. by taking a credit card, if the site contained any material that is "harmful to minors," whatever that means.

Comments

Re:Put the computer next to Mommy.

[smussman]

"Parenting" - it doesn't end at birth.

Parenting is an exponentially decaying function. Kids require a lot when they're young, and then less as they age, to the point where they don't really need it any more. But it's still barely there.

Re:Good

[Gideon Fubar]

3 points:
1. Children explore, and often explore things they're not supposed to. The fact that this site even exists is testimony to that. They will find things out of their own accord, and denying them information just makes it more likely they'll find information you don't want them to have.

2. This law is unenforceable in the current technological environment. This is not a moral issue. It's just too hard to effectively block one specific type of content, because computers simply cannot relate to human morality. In addition, it's easy to get around whatever blocks you might put in place.

3. I'm not even 35 yet (a few years to go, actually..), and i've seen all the problems you described. Most of the people they happened to didn't use the internet, many of the problems were caused by people much older than 35 who also didn't use the internet. No law governing search engine content, or page content, or restrictions on underage people using the internet would have prevented them. These things happened before the advent of the information age, and have been steadily decreasing ever since, which actually suggests all this moral indecency is, in fact, doing our young minds a world of good.. At least given the qualifiers you used.
Yes, by the way, I am aware that my experience is anecdotal.

I'd also like to say that i wholeheartedly reject your assumptions about psychology and psychological damage being inherently linked to sexual exposure, but that's a discussion for another time.