US judge invalidates internet porn law

US government on Thursday suffered another setback in their struggle to control Internet pornography when a federal judge in Philadelphia struck down the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a 1998 law that restricts commercial Web site operators to let children access inappropriate material, finding the law facially violative of the First and Fifth Amendments of the United States Constitution.

In the ruling overturning COPA, Senior Judge Lowell Reed Jr. of the Federal District Court wrote that although he sympathized with the goal of restricting minors from seeing pornography, but the law was ineffective, overly broad and at odds with free speech rights.

“Despite my personal regret at having to set aside yet another attempt to protect our children from harmful material,” Judge Reed wrote, he was blocking the law out of concern that “perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.”

Designed by former President Clinton, COPA passed in 1998 with the declared purpose of controlling Internet pornography and protecting minors from harmful sexual material on the internet.

Under the law, commercial Web sites that allow children to access material deemed "harmful to minors" by "contemporary community standards" would be criminalized. The Web publishers would have been required to request credit card information or other proof of age from Web site users to prevent children from viewing inappropriate material. Violators can face a US$50,000 fine and up to six months behind bars.

But, the judge said the law is unconstitutionally vague and fails to address current concerns about online predators, social networking sites and chat rooms, and parents can protect their children through less restrictive methods including software filters that do not limit the rights of others to free speech.

"Even defendant's own study shows that all but the worst performing (software) filters are far more effective than COPA would be at protecting children from sexually explicit material on the Web," said Reed, who presided over a month-long trial in the fall.

Yesterday’s ruling represents a second major setback in federal efforts to control Internet pornography, after a similar law was struck down by the Supreme court in 1997. That time the court rejected the Communications Decency Act, which targeted "indecent" or "patently offensive" material, as unconstitutional.

A preliminary injunction was granted in February 1999 and upheld by the Supreme Court in February 2004 on grounds the law was likely to be struck down and was perhaps outdated.

Thursday’s ruling has sparked a verbal battle between the defendants of the nine-year-old Child Online Protection Act and the critics of the law.

"It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government's addressing the problem at its source," said a government attorney, Peter D. Keisler, who said depending solely on filters was insufficient.

However, critics argued that filters work best because they allow parents set limits based on their own values and their child's age.