It’s the age-old conflict: Minors want to look at adult material, and neither their parents nor the government want to let them – so the question for today’s webmasters is how to comply with the law without being so Orwellian as to drive away paying adults?
It was – is! – a knotty problem, and no one on the Internext “Age Verification” panel Saturday at the Sands Expo Center had a definitive answer – not even moderator Lawrence Walters, a Florida First Amendment attorney with the firm of Weston, Garrou, DeWitt & Walters, who routinely hands out the “Birthday Verifier” program to his clients.
The government exploits age issues, Walters noted, and while brick & mortar adult retailers have dealt with fake IDs for years, it’s not so easy to do so online, especially since the major credit card companies have little problem issuing cards to minors and disclaiming that their cards can be used for age verification purposes. The Child Online Protection Act (COPA), however, provides that the cards can be used for just that purpose, as part of a “good faith effort” to keep minors away from sexual materials – but COPA (more properly, ACLU v. Ashcroft) is about to come to trial in the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, and technology has had a revolution or two in the years since that suit was filed.
Walters’ partner, Clyde DeWitt, noted that several laws, including a Michigan statute criminalizing the “corruption of minors,” have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, with Justice Frankfurter opining of the overly-restrictive law, “This is to burn the house to roast the pig.”
In addition to Walters and DeWitt, the panel consisted of attorney Greg Piccionelli, who deals heavily with Internet-related free speech issues in his practice; Joan Irvine, executive director of Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection (ASACP); Sean Trotter, who handles Internet issues for Adam & Eve; and Kathee Brewer, journalist for AVN Online and all had different ideas on how to handle the minors’ access issue.
Irvine told the assemblage that her organization favors, as the front page for sites with sexual material, a disclaimer page that doesn’t even show nudity, asks for an affirmation that the browser is 18 or older, and allows those not interested in sexual material a quick and easy exit from the site.
Piccionelli took that concept a step further, noting that several federal and state laws, such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, prohibit misuse of a website’s contents, and a minor trying to access the material would certainly constitute a misuse. Therefore, Piccionelli suggests that a site’s disclaimer page specifically cite the various laws a minor “hacker” would be breaking by trying to enter the site, which Piccionelli feels would provide some protection if the site owner is later cited for allowing the access.
Trotter informed that his company, adameve.com, won’t even let minors who try to enter the site from non-U.S. addresses have access to his company’s materials, and warned that, “Unless you like orange jumpsuits and shackles,” adult webmasters had better take stringent steps to keep minors off their sites.
But while Brewer, who wrote much of the age verification material for AVN Online’s February issue, noted that many webmasters that she contacted for the article were of the opinion that it is the parents’ job to prevent their children from accessing adult material online, Piccionelli followed by saying that, “It’s laudable to protect the kids … but we shouldn’t throw out constitutional rights to do it.”
Piccionelli also opined that there is no sure way to verify age online, with DeWitt adding that “Kids will find a way in anyway,” and that, in his estimation, the government will have no problem driving adult webmasters out of business with onerous and expensive regulations if it thinks they will prevent minors from accessing the material. Piccionelli also decried, “the temerity with which the industry is knuckling under” to government regulation,” which he sees as “bad for the industry.”
DeWitt predicted that federal law will soon require that credit card processing of adult-related charges will soon be linked to age verification, though he gave no specific methodology by which he expected that to be accomplished.
Trotter, whose company uses the Aristotle, or “Verify Me,” software to verify age, noted that isn’t easy, is expensive and is very violative of a customer’s privacy, which later led to a discussion of the possibility of identity theft, and Piccionelli predicted that “Look-up databases will probably be the direction [verification] goes,” and that many adult site companies won’t be able to afford it.
A short but lively question-and-answer session followed, but the subject is too broad to bee addressed in a single seminar. Readers of AVN Online, however, should be able to find some answers to their remaining questions in the February issue.
