Court Strikes Down Internet Censorship Law Intended to Protect Kids

A federal district court declared as unconstitutional a law that would have required commercial websites to verify the age of a visitor before displaying any content that might be deemed harmful to minors, adding what is likely to be one of the final chapters in an eight-year court battle between the ACLU and the government which have already twice skirmished over the issue in front of the Supreme Court.

On Thursday, the U.S. District Court in Eastern Pennsylvania declared that the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 -- signed into law by President Bill Clinton -- violates the First Amendment and is not the most effective way to keep children from adult websites due to the current state of web filtering software. The same judge Lowell Reed, Jr. who wrote Thursday's opinion issued the original temporary injunction in 1998, preventing the law from ever going into effect. The ACLU argued that the measures, which would only apply to sites hosted in the States, would be ineffective given the first W in WWW, and that the law's onerous age-verification requirements would stifle the First Amendment rights of sites such as one that gives sexual advice to people with disabilities.

This court, along with a broad spectrum of the population across the country yearn for a solution which would protect children from such material with 100 percent effectiveness. However, I am acutely aware of my charge under the law to uphold the principles found in our nation’s Constitution and their enforcement throughout the years by the Supreme Court. I may not turn a blind eye to the law in order to attempt to satisfy my urge to protect this nation’s youth by upholding a flawed statute, especially when a more effective and less restrictive alternative is readily available (although I do recognize that filters are neither a panacea nor necessarily found to be the ultimate solution to the problem at hand).[...]

I conclude that COPA facially violates the First and Fifth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs because: (1) COPA is not narrowly tailored to the compelling interest of Congress; (2) defendant has failed to meet his burden of showing that COPA is the least restrictive and most effective alternative in achieving the compelling interest; and (3) COPA is impermissibly vague and overbroad.

Ruling. (.pdf)

Reed reached the decision after a full hearing of arguments in the case last November, which the government prepared for by attempting to subpoena records from the internet's largest search engines, including Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft and Google. The request came to light after Google fought the subpoena in court. Google largely won that court battle.

COPA was Congress's narrowed down successor to 1996's Communications Decency Act, a bill that would have extended the censorship requirements of over-the-air television broadcasting to the Internet. The Supreme Court struck down a key portion of that bill, a landmark victory that allowed free-speech, from blogs to tasteless photoshopping contests to countless porn sites, to continue to flourish on the internet.

Thursday's ruling will likely be appealed to a federal appeals court and then on to the Supreme Court, which has twice (2000, 2004 story, opinion (.pdf)) largely agreed with lower court rulings against the law.

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