The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether the Child Online Protection Act, which aims to keep minors from seeing Internet porn, violates the First Amendment, with a decision expected by the end of June 2004.
The justices agreed to take a Justice Department appeal defending the COPA, in a case in which the high court sent the case back to a federal appeals court without addressing the free speech questions.
The American Civil Liberties Union, online publishers, booksellers, and others have challenged the law on First Amendment grounds and the lower courts have stopped the government from enforcing the 1998 law, aimed at regulating minors' access to Web porn after the Communications Decency Act was struck down on First Amendment grounds.
Free Speech Coalition legislative affairs director Kat Sunlove said there's a place for some regulation, particularly the kind she called front-porch regulation, addressing the home page of adult Websites but not what's inside.
"If you accidentally land there, and you're not going to see anything of an explicit nature, that would be regulation that would still fly under the Constitution," Sunlove said. "That would be a reasonable regulation. And the good guys do that already. It's the bad players they're trying to corral, and I can understand parents' concern. Obviously, part of the solution is parental supervision at the computer, parental education around sex, but both of those things are not done sufficiently."
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held in March that screening methods required by COPA, including credit card verification, require adults "unfairly" to identify themselves before they can see constitutionally-protected materials. U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, in the government's appeal of that ruling, said it left "minors unprotected from the harmful effects of the enormous amount of pornography on the World Wide Web."
"The appeals court pointed out that the effect of the statute would be to deprive adults of the ability to access constitutionally protected material on the Internet, and therefore the statute suffered from the same constitutional flaw that had led the Supreme Court in 1997 to strike down (the Communications Decency Act)," the ACLU said, announcing its call for the Supreme Court to let the 3rd Circuit Court ruling stand.
