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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.
But it's for the children!!!!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Parents, it's your job to watch your kids, not anybody else's.
Je me fous du passé
Another stunning blow to the Bush administration and their complete disregard for our civil liber...
Oh. Never mind. I'll just go back to my job at the New York Times now.
There are so many good options for parental control software today that this kind of stuff is totally unnecessary. Then again, I guess that means that parents will actually have to buy it, and pay attention to what their kids are doing online.
Affordable Health Coverage
Finally. Now my children don't have to keep bugging me for my credit card when they want to visit adult sites.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080721/1545501748.shtml">Techdirt's latest on the topic
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Fuck parental controls. If you believe that your children are not old enough to "surf" on their own, then just put the computer next to you while your children use it.
"Parenting" - it doesn't end at birth.
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.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
COPA is just an artifact from the days when no one knew how to apply constitutional law to the Internet. Unfortunately, we are now in for years of quasi-successful bills that will only serve to screw up the structure and nature of cyberspace. I wish these politicians would at least try to learn about the Internet before they pass ridiculously unconstitutional bills.
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?
My children ARE porn stars, you insensitive clod!
Love,
Chris Matthews
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:
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.
Yeah because going to an unsavory website and requiring access by giving them my credit card information without actually buying anything is a GREAT idea. I can't think of anyone I trust more with my credit information than a pr0n site... Not to mention a child would never be able to get access to a credit card, or the pr0n stashed in their parents' sock drawer, or saved on the hard drive, or on the recent documents list, or...
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.
Stupid laws like this is the reason we have so much Identity theft here in the US. The moment that people think that giving out your credit card number to some site just to say, register for a blog, or view some porn, is normal, is the moment that even more scam sites will emerge.
It was an absolutely stupid idea to check anything with a credit card when you don't know even *who* that is going to half the time. And what the card is being used for.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I didn't know that Michael Jackson had a slashdot account?
If you ask me, any site that extols the virtues of Milton Friedman as an economists is "harmful to minors".
These stories show how bad Slashdot has gotten. The thought of keeping little kids off of porn sickens the average Slashdotter? Absolutely pathetic excuses for humans.
And the thought of restricting the rights of adults for little or no foreseeable gain doesn't sicken you? That sickens me.
Pathetic attempt at trolling.
A quote from Justice department spokesperson Charles miller: "We are disappointed that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Congressional statute designed to protect our children from exposure to sexually explicit material on the internet."
See, all they're trying to do is keep kids from seeing sex on the internet, they're not trying to limit your freedoms.
Here's a solution that will make both camps happy: pass a law that all children must be executed.
Well, you don't tend to have organisations and schools preaching at children that they must believe in Santa Claus. You don't have "Santa Claus" schools specifically set up for that purpose. I imagine those are the sorts of things he meant.
FWIW, I wouldn't want to criminalise someone for exposing a child to religion. But I do think it's ridiculous that people are obsessed with censoring (or in some cases, criminalising possession of) media "because a child might see it", yet this is not applied to religion. On the contrary, some of the same people who freak out that a 17 year old might see a nipple or hear a swear word seem happy to preach religion at other people's small children.
If some people come to their senses. The vechicles being used to exploit kids these days aren't the reason kids are being exploited. Parents should watch what their kids are doing. It's called good parenting. The idiots blaming technology should keep using it to catch these sick fucks. I know what appalls me the most, that their are sick fucks out there taking advantage of children... The next appalling thing is that politicians don't have one clue about the real problem and wave a victory flag everytime they wage war against technology because some slimeball tells them this will get them more popular. People like Andrew Cuomo aren't doing anything good to help kids. NOTHING. NADDA. They are basically misleading parents ... and the parents (not to their fault, they just want to protect their children from horrible shit like usenet) are eating this up...
I'm more than agitated with this, not because it hurts technology somehow, but because you have more clueless sit hands politicians that have no touch with reality, just as long as they are popular. I wish it wasn't so illegal to slap some of these assholes upside the head.
Is it just me that remembers that the idea of "childhood" is at most a century old? Prior to that they were adults-in-training.
So this entire "Think of the children" crap is more about protecting an idea that these small humans should be shielded from the realities of life instead of educated so they actually do become adults.
I think the new definition of childhood actually extends into the mid-20s because of more societal pressure. They're in college, they really aren't responsible yet, etc.
Screw that. It's the parents job to get those little monsters properly trained to be responsible adults. Heck, overseas 'kids' are in professional training schools by they time they're sixteen. Here they're still considered helpless babes who can't do anything without mommy and daddy there to make sure they don't get 'damaged'.
Don't even get me started on that whole self-esteem vs actual value stuff that the schools are promoting.
I realize I'm starting to sound like an old fogey but I guess that's what I am. I'm tired of seeing these poor young adults with absolutely no idea of what is expected of them or how to achieve it. And all because of some misguided idea that they should be protected while they're young instead of taught.
I despair.
Personally, I would like to see children protected -- but not from porn.
I take your statement to infer that you'd rather that children be psychologically damaged to the extent that they can't enjoy sex by the time they're old enough to engage in it? Hopefully not, but I've noticed that there seems to be some misunderstandings about the reasons legislators pass laws against porn. It isn't about forcing some Puritan morality on the public at large. It really is about protecting the children - not your children - theirs.
Most girls don't look like models. Most guys don't have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_penis_size/12 inches [NSFW] to satisfy their potential mate. What happens when little girls and boys look at porn is that they form unrealistic expectations of sex:
The complications and anxieties that such beliefs can form is left as an exercise for the reader. But I myself on more than one occasion have had to deal with the fallout from the porn industry, and am well aware that it does damage people. Perhaps not in the immediately recognizable, medical, or clinical sense, but it definitely affects people in a mental and spiritual way.
And honestly, why would you want to take anything away from a person's future enjoyment of sex? So you can maintain your own fantasies about what sex would be like if you could get it?
This law isn't about denying porn to those who will make an effort to get it, but rather, about protecting children from inadvertently stumbling upon it. As a parent, I don't want my child's Google search for "hot fire truck" to serve up porn. Until I'm convinced that an innocent phrase won't turn up porn, my kid isn't going to use the internet. So what a law like this really does is allow children to be exposed to the internet, because without such controls, parents such as myself just won't let our children use the internet.
When I was growing up, I was allowed unfettered access to a computer. Sadly, because of the widespread availability of porn (among other things...), I'm not sure if I'll be able to extend that same privilege to my children. And that's quite sad, that in a mere 20 years, the environment of learning and discovery with which I grew up has been co-opted from an intellectual playground into merely just another content distribution mechanism for the masses.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.