U.S. Supreme Court (Finally) Kills Online Age Verification Law

[Agnapostate]

MediaShift . U.S. Supreme Court (Finally) Kills Online Age Verification Law | PBS

In 1998, the U.S. Congress enacted the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a law intended to control child access to sexually explicit material on the Internet. The law was immediately challenged on free speech and other grounds and its enforcement was delayed. After ten years of litigation, on January 22 the U.S. Supreme Court dealt the final blow to the law by refusing to hear the U.S. Government's last appeal from lower court rulings declaring the law unconstitutional.

The Internet might have been a very different place if the law had the law been upheld, at least in the United States.

The Child Online Protection Act
The prospect of children obtaining access to obscene and indecent material on the Internet has preoccupied Congress since online networked communications moved into wide public use in the 1990s. When the more broadly applicable anti-obscenity provisions of the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 were struck down as an unconstitutional restraint on free speech, Congress quickly tried again with COPA. The hope was that a more narrowly focused law aimed at protecting children under the age of 17 from sexually explicit material would survive a constitutional challenge.

COPA defined the posting of material that is "harmful to minors" on the Internet for commercial purposes as a criminal offense. But the Act also provided that website operators and other content providers could defend against a prosecution under the Act by showing that children's access to harmful content was restricted by requiring the use of a credit card, a debit account, an "adult access code" or "adult personal identification number," a "digital certificate that verifies age," or "any other reasonable measures that are feasible under available technology."

In other words, to avoid prosecution, website operators and other content providers would be put in the position of either removing content that might be deemed "harmful to minors," or putting it behind a firewall and limiting access via some kind of age-verification technology.

(Continued at Source...)

It's about time. The constitutionality of such censorship was dubious ever since the formation of the original Communications Decency Act, which was struck down quickly and fortunately.