BY GEOFF DUPAIX
geoff@du2.byu.edu
The American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation and seventeen other groups have joined in another lawsuit against the latest attempt by Congress to curtail pornography on the Internet.
The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) requires online commercial pornographers who sell or distribute material considered harmful to minors to install age-verification systems of face up to six months in jail and/or up to $50,000 in fines. Some verification systems may include credit card numbers, personal identification numbers, or digital signatures when the technology becomes readily available.
Ann Beeson, an ACLU lawyer, said COPA is just the same law as the original Communications Decency Act that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutional in 1997.
'The law has the same defect as the original law because of the nature of the Internet. It limits adults communicating with each other,' she said.
Beeson, who was involved with the first case against the CDA in 1996, said COPA does not balance the right of adults to view adult material while protecting children. She said the law completely restricts any communication between adults and those there needs to be a different standard for children and adults. Beeson also said the best way to protect children from pornography is parental control.
'Parental responsibility is a much better method than having government tell you what you can and can't see,' she said.
Stephen Clark, director for the ACLU in Salt Lake, agreed. 'They clearly didn't learn their lesson the first time. You can't reduce the Internet into a one-size-fits all least common denominator approach. All they did was rename it,' he said.
Clark said COPA, like the CDA, fails the three-prong obscenity test developed by the Supreme Court in the 1973 Miller v. California case. In that case, the Court ruled that material is obscene if:
'1. An average person, applying contemporary local community standards, finds that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest. 2. The works depicts in a patently offensive way sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law. 3. The work in question lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.'
Clark said the main responsibility lies on the parents and not the heavy hand of government. He said there are plenty of filtering systems out in the market that parents need to use those to screen out material they find offensive.
But Randy Tate of the Christian Coalition supports the new law. He said the law is a benefit not only for parents but also for children and the community.
'By passing this legislation, the House asserts that parents should not be the only ones to bear the burden in the fight against pornographers who are exploiting children via this new technology,' Tate said. '(COPA) provides parents a tool they sorely need to bring up their kids in a culture where even the nightly news is awash in X-rated material,' he said.
JR Rush, an associate professor of communications at BYU who teaches most of the communications law classes, said there are some problems with COPA. He said the main problem with this type of legislation is trying to balance the interests of government in allowing an adult to have accessed material that is inappropriate for children. The second problem is that COPA, like the CDA, bans too much speech.
However, he said that if some sexual material is bad for kids, it should be bad for adults too. Rush also said most filtering software restricts too much information that really doesn't need to be blocked out. He said it would be best if Internet service providers develop their own rating system. But until that happens, having some protection is better than none at all.
'If you want to give people some choice, then you give parents something that actually will work. Any rating scheme is a problem, but what is the alternative? Public education?' Rush said.