At the conclusion of a four-week trial, a federal judge has struck down a 1998 U.S. law that makes it a crime for commercial website operators to let children access "harmful" material, according to the Associated Press. Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. put the preventative responsibilities on parents in his ruling, deciding those means would not limit the rights of others to free speech.
"Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection," wrote Reed Jr.
According to the report, the law, also known as the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) would have criminalized sites that allow children to access material deemed "harmful to minors" by "contemporary community standards," with penalties including $50,000 and imprisonment.
Several sites challenged the law, backed by the ACLU, arguing it was unconstitutional and vague. The law addressed material accessed by children under 17, but applied only to content hosted in the United States.
Congress tried, unsuccessfully, to ban online pornography in 1996. COPA, however, narrowed the restrictions to commercial sites and made an attempt at defining indecency more specifically.
In defense of COPA, government lawyers attacked software filters as ineffectual, contradicting claims they have made in addresseing filter use in public schools and libraries. According to the report, critics of the law retorted filters are most effective when parents set filters according to their own values and child's age.
