January 21, 2009 (IDG News Service) The U.S. Supreme Court today again refused to resurrect a federal law that required Web sites containing "material harmful to minors" to implement age-based access restrictions, presumably ending a 10-year fight over whether the law violated free-speech rights on the Internet.
The court declined to hear an appeal that was filed by former President George W. Bush's administration, asking the justices to overturn a lower court's ruling against enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act of 1998. In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit struck down COPA for the third time, saying that the law was a vague and overly broad attack on free speech.
This also is the third time that the Supreme Court has declined to restore COPA after lower courts ruled against the measure.
The Bush administration had asked the court to review the Third Circuit decision, contending that COPA was needed to protect children from being exposed to explicit sexual material online. But civil liberties groups that have been critical of COPA praised the court's decision to ignore the request.
"For over a decade, the government has been trying to thwart freedom of speech on the Internet, and for years the courts have been finding the attempts unconstitutional," Chris Hansen, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. "It is not the role of the government to decide what people can see and do on the Internet. Those are personal decisions that should be made by individuals and their families."
Leslie Harris, president and CEO of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, said in a statement that the Supreme Court's decision "ends the government's quixotic and wasteful 10-year effort to impose an unconstitutional censorship standard on Internet content."
"Despite continuing pressure to force ever more restrictive standards on Internet content," Harris continued, "this new political climate provides the right opportunity to say, 'Yes we can' protect children online without compromising First Amendment principles."
COPA's restrictions applied to a variety of Web content, including pictures, recordings and writing. The law defined material harmful to minors as something that the average person, "applying contemporary community standards, would find ... is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest." People who posted adult content online without blocking access by minors faced up to six months in prison under the law.
COPA opponents have included the ACLU, the CDT, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Nerve.com Inc., Salon Media Group Inc., Urban Dictionary LLC and The Sexual Health Network Inc. They argued that the law amounted to government censorship and was so broad that it would affect many Web sites, including ones posting information on sexually transmitted diseases.
COPA was successfully challenged for the first time in 2000, when the Third Circuit appeals court upheld a U.S. District Court judge's injunction against the implementation of the law. Two years later, the Supreme Court upheld the injunction but sent the case back to the district court for further proceedings.
In 2003, the Third Circuit appeals panel again ruled that the law violated the U.S. Constitution. The following year, the Supreme Court again looked at COPA and again sent the case back to the district court — this time to determine whether there had been any changes in technology that affected the implementation of the law, such as whether commercial blocking software was as effective as the COPA restrictions might be.
In March 2007, a district court judge once again overturned COPA, and the U.S. Department of Justice filed another appeal. That eventually led to today's decision not to hear the appeal.
In 1997, the Supreme Court struck down a similar measure, called the Communications Decency Act, that had been passed by Congress and signed into law the year before.
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