Judge rules against online porn law

Free-speech advocates cheered a judge’s ruling Thursday that a 1998 law requiring that U.S. Web sites wall off sexual content from minors violates the U.S. Constitution.

Judge Lowell Reed Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania barred U.S. law enforcement agencies from enforcing the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA. Reed, in an 84-page decision, said the law violates the Constitution’s guarantees of free-speech and due-process rights.

The U.S. Department of Justice failed to show that COPA is the “least restrictive, most effective alternative” available to protect children from sexual content online, Reed wrote.

COPA would require Web sites publishing adult material to restrict access to minors by taking steps such as requiring credit-card information for access to that material. Penalties for not restricting access include fines of up to US$50,000 per day and up to six months in prison.

A DOJ spokesman said Thursday afternoon that the agency was still reviewing Reed’s decision. The DOJ hasn’t yet determined what its next step will be, the spokesman said.

Reed’s decision “perpetuates the unbroken chain of Internet censorship cases that the government has lost” in the last 10 years, said Adam Thierer, director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Communications Decency Act, an earlier attempt to regulate Internet speech.

Thierer, writing on his blog, said the U.S. government should focus instead on educating Internet users about pornography and other dangers. Filtering programs are a better alternative to a law attempting to protect children from pornography, he and other COPA critics have said.

“Untold millions have been spent by the government litigating this decision, and they may not be done yet,” he wrote. “If all the money that has been spent litigating this case had instead been spent on media literacy and online safety campaigns, it could have produced concrete, lasting results. But our government appears obsessed with pursuing regulatory mandates and legal appeals instead.”

COPA has never been enforced because of legal challenges. The district court in Philadelphia and a federal appeals court have found the law unconstitutional on freedom-of-speech grounds, and the Supreme Court upheld the ban on enforcement of the law in June 2004.

The Supreme Court, however, asked the Pennsylvania court to decide whether any changes in technology would affect the constitutionality of the law. The high court wanted the district court to look into issues such as whether commercially available blocking software was as effective as the banned law in blocking “harmful” material. A four-week trial on those questions began in October.

In his decision, Reed said filtering software is easy for parents to install and use. Filters check Web content dynamically and filters can block 95 percent or more of adult content, he said. “Filtering products have improved over time, and are now more effective than ever before,” he wrote.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties and privacy advocacy group, cheered Reed’s ruling, but staff members predicted there will be new attempts in Congress to regulate speech online. Recently, the U.S. Congress’ focus has turned to age verification of social-networking sites, CDT Executive Director Leslie Harris noted.

“It’s an election year [in 2008], and it will be irresistible to some people,” Harris said.