Pennsylvania's child pornography law has blocked at least 600,000 Websites having nothing to do with child porn and needs to be overturned, the Center for Democracy and Technology planned to argue beginning January 6 before a federal judge in Philadelphia.
The law lets district attorneys compel Internet service providers to block access to Websites they believe contain child porn, but the CDT and their supporters - including the American Civil Liberties Union - argue that those orders have blocked hundreds of thousands of other sites sharing the same address and thus impede free speech.
"The blocking by ISPs of access to specified Internet Websites...has led to vast and continuing interference with constitutionally protected speech on the Internet," the CDT argued in a plaintiff's brief. "The very theory of the Informal Notices and the Statute - which have the effect of preventing all speech, without regard to its content, at a particular location on the Internet - represents a classic prior restraint and is wholly unsupportable under clear First Amendment law."
The CDT, the ACLU, and Plantagenet, Inc., the third of these an ISP, have sued to overturn the Pennsylvania child porn law. The CDT favors suing the child pornographers directly or asking their hosting companies to remove their sites and content. But the state has argued prosecuting them is "expensive and difficult, especially if the suspect is located overseas," and that getting foreign-based Web hosts to cooperate is just as difficult, according to acting Pennsylvania Attorney General Gerald Pappert's filing in the case.
He also challenged whether CDT, the ACLU, and Plantagenet had legitimate standing to sue.
"CDT may have standing as an alleged receiver of speech, and (the) ACLU may have standing as an organization some of whose members are alleged receivers of speech to challenge procedures used to determine child pornography," Pappert argued in his filing. "But they do not have standing to challenge either the statute or the informal notice process insofar as the claims depend on decisions of the ISPs...Plantagenet has one employee...(i)t does not own or operate the equipment that a real ISP would own and operate....no citizen will likely complain...about child pornography accessed through Plantagenet because so few citizens use (its) services."
