U.S. Supreme Court refused to step in and save the Child Online Protection Act. Children should be protected from sexually explicit online material, but a misguided law is not the answer to it. A law against a social evil cant another social evil – in this case, infringing free speech.
Child Online Protection Act was passed in 1998. It imposed civil and criminal penalties, including up to six months in prison, for offering materials online that was harmful to minors.
But the courts quickly blocked the law from taking effect. In July, the Circuit Court in Philadelphia, struck down the act, which it found to violate the First Amendment in a number of ways.
Among other things, the court ruled that the law’s purpose could be achieved, with less damage to free expression, if parents used filtering software to keep objectionable material away from children.
The Bush administration appealed that ruling, arguing that if it were allowed to stand, millions of children would be exposed to online pornography. But the American Civil Liberties Union, which had brought the original challenge, insisted that the act unconstitutionally stifled the free speech rights of adult Internet users – because it would cover more than just pornography that children may be seeing.
The act was ineffective since it did not regulate foreign Web sites.
We cannot attain the goal of protecting minors through a censorship regime. One option is filtering software. But schools and colleges using such filtering software will also look to cut out other websites like facebook and myspace, thus violating civil rights again.
