NEW YORK - A federal judge in Ohio overturned the state law restricting online dissemination of sexually oriented material that is illegal for children to view, saying the law violates the First Amendment, the Media Coalition reported Tuesday.
The lawsuit was brought by organizations representing booksellers, book publishers, music and video retailers, newspapers and others. The Media Coalition coordinated the legal action for the organizations.
"In striking down the law, [the] decision is consistent with every other court ruling on similar laws," said David Horowitz, executive director of the Media Coalition. "While we should have adequate legal safeguards to shield children from objectionable content, those safeguards cannot unreasonably interfere with the rights of adults to have access to materials that are legal for them."
According to the Media Coalition, the Ohio law attempted to prohibit sending sexually oriented material to a recipient whom the sender knows is a minor or should know is a minor. The coalition said Judge Walter Herbert Rice of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio ruled that the law violated the First Amendment because it was too broadly written. He also said the law could have ensnared adults having sexually frank discussions with other adults in chat rooms and other similar online venues, the group reported. The judge noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that "every user of the Internet has reason to know that some participants in chat rooms are minors" and there is no way to ensure that minors are not part of the conversations. The judge also noted that several other courts had reached the same conclusion regarding similar laws in other states.
"Judge Rice also declared that the law violated the First Amendment because it failed to target only individuals who intended to disseminate sexually oriented material to children with the intent of luring the children into sexual activity, which was the ostensible purpose of the law," the Media Coalition said.
The Media Coalition has posted the decision on its website.
Adult industry attorney Joe Obenberger told AVN Online that the court invalidated a statute restricting internet content, a statute allegedly drafted only to affect the conduct of pedophiles. He noted that the court had no trouble "seeing through this phony argument because the law affected what all people can say on the Internet" and determining that the statute was unconstitutional as overbroad. The court has enjoined the enforcement of the statute. He stated that "it cannot be enforced, that no one can be arrested for a violation, no one will be put on trial, and no one will go to jail for violating it."
"It is interesting to me that the court rejected the Commerce Clause argument that the states wrongfully encroach on federal powers when they aim to regulate Internet Content," Obenberger stated.
Obenberger predicted, "I would not be surprised to see appeals filed in the near future from the Booksellers Association or from the State, who have each lost something."
