Internet Pornography, the ACLU, and Congress Essay -- Cyberporn Essay

net income Porn, the ACLU, and sexual relation Ashcroft vs. ACLU, 00-1293, deals with a challenge to the Child Online defense Act (COPA), which Congress passed in 1998. The law, which is the subject of this essay, attempts to protect minor league from exposure to Internet smut fungus by requiring that commercial swelled websites containing indecent material that is harmful to minor league use age-verification mechanisms such as credit cards or adult identification numbers.(Child) An earlier version of the law -- the 1996 Communications Decency Act -- was struck down as an unconstitutional restriction of free speech when challenged by the ACLU the 1998 version attempted to address the constitutional concerns by limiting its mountain chain to commercial websites, and carving out an exception for material that has serious literary, prowessistic, semipolitical or scientific value for minors. (Communications) COPA makes adult website operators liable for criminal sanctions -- u p to $50,000 in fines and six months in jail -- if children are able to vex material deemed indecent, by contemporary community standards, for those under 16. This raises the sticky unloose of what community should set the standard for the global world of the Internet. No angiotensin converting enzyme has been prosecuted under COPA the ACLU brought suit as soon as the law was passed, and a federal judge in Pennsylvania agreed to block enforcement. The trinity Circuit upheld the injunction, ruling that COPAs reliance on community standards improperly allows the more or less conservative communities to dictate what should be considered indecent. The ACLU represents a number of plaintiffs who publish materials online, including an art gallery, Salon.com magazine, a bookstore, and the producer of a... ...rmful to minors on the Web, Beeson responded There isnt any counseling to make it a crime to display material harmful to minors on the Web. A decision from the Supreme Court is expected quondam(prenominal) in the spring of 2002. This case does not directly address the matter of how the community standards requirement applies to determining whether online material is obscene (speech that does not come up First Amendment protection) rather than merely indecent (harmful for minors but protected for adults). The courts ruling will nonetheless be significant in equipment casualty of the future of the community standards test for obscenity online. WORKS CITED Child Online Protection Act. http//www.epic.org/free_speech/censorship/copa.html Communications Decency Act. http//www.epic.org/CDA/cda.html Legal Challenge to COPA http//www.epic.org/free_speech/copa/complaint.html