[Bill]

I liked what the judge said - a federal judge with some sense-

"“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,” Judge Lowell Reed Jr., who presided over a four-week trial last fall, wrote in the decision today, The Associated Press reported."

What the FREE SPEECH COALITION rep said was cool too...


From the NYT:


A federal judge in Philadelphia struck down a 1998 law today that made it a crime for commercial Web site operators to allow children under 17 to gain access to “harmful” material.

In the ruling, the judge said that software filters installed on home computers, and other less restrictive means, were a better way to protect children than laws that limit 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,” Judge Lowell Reed Jr., who presided over a four-week trial last fall, wrote in the decision today, The Associated Press reported.

Under the 1998 law, called the Child Online Protection Act, it was a crime for a Web site to allow access to material that was deemed harmful under “contemporary community standards” without first requiring some proof of age, such as a valid credit card. Penalties under the law ranged up to a $50,000 fine and six months in prison for each violation.

The law was challenged by operators of web sites about reproductive health, by the online magazine Salon, and by other sites with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union. They argued that the law was unconstitutionally vague, and obtained a temporary injunction to keep it from being enforced while the challenge was pending. The Supreme Court upheld that temporary injunction in 2004 on the ground that the law was likely to be struck down at trial. Charles Miller, a spokesman for the United States Department of Justice, said today that the department is reviewing the decision, and is not ready to say what steps it intends to take next.

Diane Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, an adult entertainment trade group, applauded the decision.

“Predators are the real danger to children, and the adult entertainment community supports prosecution of people who are targeting children,” she said.

Ms. Duke said that many of her group’s 3,200 members, each of whom may have scores or hundreds of separate web sites, add tags to their sites to make sure that filtering software can block them. She said the group is now studying how many sites do so.

“We don’t intend for children to access this material,” she said. “We intend for this to be viewed by adults. It’s for adults, by adults.”

Technology experts told The A.P. that parents now have more serious concerns about the Web than pornography — for example, the use by online predators of social-networking sites like News Corporation’s MySpace site.

In their defense of the 1998 law, government lawyers took issue with software filters as burdensome and less effective than a criminal statute, though the government has successfully defended a 2000 law requiring the use of filters in schools and libraries that receive federal money.

“It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government’s addressing the problem at its source,” a government lawyer, Peter D. Keisler, argued in a post-trial brief.

The law applied only to content hosted in the United States One of the arguments made by the law’s challengers was that fear of prosecution would simply lead Web site operators to move overseas, beyond its reach.

Congress tried without success in 1996 to ban online pornography outright, but that law, too, failed to stand up to a legal challenge that it was too vague and conflicted with adults’ free-speech rights. The Supreme Court overturned that law in 1997.