Via Wired -
Introduced by Rep. Mike Oxley (R-Ohio) in 1999, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) makes it a crime for commercial Web sites to give minors access to "harmful material," defined as any sexually explicit communication that lacks "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Violators face up to $50,000 in fines and six months in prison.
This affects far more than just porn producers -- even news organizations publishing articles and videos that could be deemed "harmful to minors" might be in trouble. Just last week, the Florida Supreme Court upheld a state version of COPA that restricted e-mail that could be deemed "harmful to minors."
Shortly after the bill was introducted, The American Civil Liberties Union immediately filed a lawsuit to block the U.S. Justice Department, and a federal judge granted an injunction barring prosecutors from enforcing the law. That injunction has been in place ever since.
But now that could change. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr. in Philadelphia will hear closing arguments in the Child Online Protection Act case, and a ruling is expected by early 2007.
You might remember the big Google vs the Government issue after the government requested huge amount of search terms from all the major search vendors. Well, all of that was for this law...the government had to prove that porn was on the internet. Is it really that hard to prove?
After looking over all the data, the government has deemed 1% of the Internet as Porn. I still think that is very low in my view. They aren't getting P2P, BitTorrent or FTP into account...
Regards, the language used in COPA is much too vague for today's world...
No comments:
Post a Comment