A Philadelphia Federal judge threw out the COPA Act yesterday on the grounds of it being "impermissibly vague and overbroad" and issued a permanent injunction against the laws enforcement.
What was COPA? To refresh, COPA was enacted in October of 1998 and made it a crime to fail to take measures to prevent minors from accessing explicit material - meaning you had to verify age by credit card or some other proof of age (we all know how effective and easy to enforce that is, right). Not only was it pretty impossible to enforce due to the nature of the internet, the judge decided COPA violates an person's First and Fifth Amendment rights. "Such a widespread application of COPA would prohibit and undoubtedly chill a substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech for adults," he said.
Rather than make the merchants responsible for who views their products, the judge felt that there are enough filtering technologies easily available to parents - essentially it is the the responsibility of the guardian of the minor to restrict access to explicit material, not the merchant/publisher who has no control over the end user nor can they see them to verify age. Holy cow there might be a shred of common sense left in this world!
But ... .xxx could be looming in the wake of the ruling
Quote:
The ruling also overlooks the issue where minors might stumble upon inappropriate content -- when using a search engine, for instance. "What worries me the most is the little 8-year-old who goes on the Internet and searches for 'doggie,'" and the results contain inappropriate material, he said. "That's the stuff that really gets to me." [Jim Culbert, information security analyst at Duval County Public Schools in Florida]
Having a way to clearly separate mature content via an .xxx domain, for example, is one way of better controlling access to such sites, he said. "I was just disappointed that the judge did not come out with some sort of support for an .xxx domain [in his ruling]. I don't think it is unreasonable to separate the inappropriate and obvious pornography from the Internet."
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The Full Story:
http://www.webwereld.nl/articles/456...ction-law.html
COPA Act has been thrown out as "unenforcable" and "violation of rights"
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