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

Harm to children

[Black Art]

What causes more harm to Children? Porn or Religion?

I see reports of kids dying because their parents were too superstitious to take them to a doctor because of their religion. i have never heard of a kid dying because he watched a porno movie or read a dirty book.

Oh wait... These are Metaphorical Children. They don't obey natural laws, only metaphorical ones.

Re:Harm to children

[Dan667]

If they really wanted to protect children, they would ban things like stoves, weights, cars etc, because they can and do hurt children or enable the hurting of children. And they are not even just dirty pictures, real actual objects that in the right hands can hurt a child. To be safe a list should be made and all of these things banned no matter what the cost. Think of the children!

Any lawyers in the house?

[geminidomino]

Is/Was this the same law that required me to essentially ban anyone under 13 from my (kid friendly) forum website because I don't have the resources necessary to manage all those permission forms?

The problem isn't really in parent's hands

[cdrguru]

The problem is the unparented children that grow up. Would it be nice if "unparenting" was a criminal offence punishable by life in prison? Sure. But that doesn't help all the people that have to live with the "unparented child". I guess we could just put them on an island and hope for the best.

See, let's start with little Johnny that watches lots of porn. Hard-core stuff. Ends up getting out of high school thinking that (a) wimmen like surprises, like rape, and (b) wimmen don't like him. Yes, (b) is a logical corallary to (a) but we won't go there. How did little Johnny get so twisted? Simple: nobody ever paid any attention to him and let him go off and figure stuff out for himself, like relating to other people. In today's world this is pretty easy to imagine.

Whose problem is it exactly when little Johnny acts out his hard-core rape fantasies? His parents? His teachers? Nope. It is your problem and mine because we have to live in the society that little Johnny is living in.

Is little Johnny fit for society? Who exactly is going to take care of little Johnny if he doesn't fit in society and can't be left alone with anything female? Couldn't we just give him back to his parents? Sadly, we can't lock him up until he accumulates enough rapes with witnesses to actually get a conviction. And just locking him up for a while isn't going to "fix" him - we have to deal with little Johnny for life and thousands more like him. How did it get this way? Because as a society we were content to assume his parents were responsible adults and could foresee what would happen if they were not effective parents. We all assumed that "the village" would help raise Johhny right even if his parents were incapable. What we got was a disaster and a human hardly worth the name.

What is the answer? I don't know. But for parents using a TV or computer as a babysitter and ignoring the kid results in damage. Damage to the kid and damage to society. We are currently dealing with that damage today, mostly in the inner cities but believe me, it isn't confined there by any means. Would COPA be a solution? Not really, but it couldn't hurt in this sort of case. Where would we go for a real solution? I think we need to think about some points:

1. Licenses and education required for breeding.
2. Real penalties for not getting help when you can't parent your offspring properly. Providing parenting help and education, even when there is a kid in the picture already, is vastly cheaper than dealing with the results later.
3. End absent-parent child support - no amount of money paid to the mother makes up for lack of a responsible two-parent family. If you can't be bothered with birth control you get to live with the results of your inattentiveness.
4. Holding parents responsible for the actions of their children, really. This means that when the 10-year-old kills a neighbor child the parents and the child are responsible. Today often as not the child gets some slap on the wrist punishment because of their age and the parents get nothing. How could you be an effective parent and not know your kid is seriously screwed up when a 10-year-old kills someone?
5. Undoubtably this means more "community resources" and "social workers" to help failing parents. But we are either going to spend the money on the front end or the back end. Right now you can check the prisons for the results of dealing with the problem on the back end.

Face it, today in the US a good deal of our troubles are parents that dump their children on "the system" and hope for the best because they haven't a clue. Or haven't the motivation. How exactly do we fix this problem? It isn't by hoping parents will do a better job. We have been hoping they would since the 1960s or even before that and it hasn't happened.