Child Pornography Law Dies Amid Legal Fight

The Associated Press – WASHINGTON — A federal law intended to restrict children’s access to Internet pornography died quietly Wednesday at the Supreme Court, more than 10 years after Congress overwhelmingly approved it.

The Child Online Protection Act would have barred Web sites from making harmful content available to minors over the Internet. The law had been embroiled in challenges to its constitutionality since it passed in 1998 and never took effect.

Also Wednesday, the court ruled unanimously in favor of a Massachusetts schoolgirl and her parents in their effort to sue a local school district under both a 1972 law against sex discrimination in education and a post-Civil War civil rights law.

Federal courts had said that the newer law, Title IX, barring sex discrimination at schools that receive federal money, was the only avenue open to the parents.

The high court disagreed, although several justices commented when they heard arguments in December that the family probably would lose their lawsuit, even if they won the right to pursue it.

Their daughter was a 5-year-old kindergarten student when she told them said she was subjected to repeated harassment by a third-grade boy on their school bus.

The Internet blocking law didn’t make it as far as a high court hearing. The justices rejected the government’s final attempt to revive the law, turning away the appeal without comment.

The American Civil Liberties Union led the challenge to the law on behalf of writers, artists and health educators. “For over a decade the government has been trying to thwart freedom of speech on the Internet, and for years the courts have been finding the attempts unconstitutional,” said Chris Hansen, the ACLU’s lead attorney on the case. “It is not the role of the government to decide what people can see and do on the Internet. Those are personal decisions that should be made by individuals and their families.”

A federal appeals court in Philadelphia earlier ruled that the law would violate the First Amendment, saying filtering technologies and other parental control tools are a less restrictive way to protect children from inappropriate content online.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123255112538902535.html

Court upholds child pornography law despite free speech concerns

The High Court was unwilling to send the law back to Congress again despite its shortcomings. The case is United States v. Williams, No 06-694 (2004)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday upheld the latest Congressional effort to curb the spread of child pornography on the Internet, a 2003 law that makes it a crime to offer or solicit sexually explicit images of children.

The law, known as the Protect Act, applies regardless of whether the material turns out to consist solely of computer-generated images, or digitally altered photographs of adults, or even if the offer is fraudulent and the material does not exist at all.

“Offers to provide or requests to obtain child pornography are categorically excluded from the First Amendment,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the 7-to-2 majority.

The law at issue was a response to a Supreme Court ruling in 2002, a decision that found unconstitutional an earlier law that prohibited simple possession of purported child pornography even if the material turned out not to depict real children. The First Amendment was violated by a law that “prohibits the visual depiction of an idea,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said in the 2002 decision.

Justice Scalia said on Monday that by limiting the crime to the “pandering” of child pornography, the new law represented “a carefully crafted attempt to eliminate the First Amendment problems we identified” in the earlier decision.

The new law and the earlier one, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, were legislative efforts to deal with the challenge that technology poses to prosecutors if they must prove that material that looks like child pornography was actually produced using real children.

Under the court’s interpretation of the 2003 statute, a person offering material as child pornography can be convicted on either of two grounds: for believing that the material depicts real children, or for intending to convince a would-be recipient that it does.

The statute itself (“Protect” is an acronym for Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today) is open to a considerably broader interpretation, which led the federal appeals court in Atlanta to invalidate it in 2006, the decision that the justices overturned on Monday. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/washington/20scotus.html?ex=1369022400&en=4ac2631f79f3b7b5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink