By Declan McCullagh, 10 March 2003 15:06
NEWS A US court has thrown out a proposed law which would have imprisoned website operators who fail to cordon off explicit material so as to protect children from seeing it. An appeals court said the law is unconstitutional as it impinges on freedom of speech laws. For the second time, the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia struck down the law. The court said: "The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) is not narrowly tailored to proscribe commercial pornographers and their ilk, as the government contends, but instead prohibits a wide range of protected expression." Ann Beeson, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who litigated the case, said: "The analysis is the one we were making from the very beginning, which is that the law makes it a crime to communicate speech that is clearly protected [by the First Amendment] to adults. The only way someone can avoid prosecution is to set up burdensome screening systems. The impact is so great it violates the First Amendment." The US Justice Department, which is defending the law, could appeal its loss to the Supreme Court a second time.
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