The Supreme Court last week actively discussed a new law that would assign a fine and jail time to those who create pornographic material on the Internet that is accessible and damaging to any minor.
According to an article in last Thursday’s New York Times, the Child Online Protection Act “carries penalties of a $50,000 fine and six months in jail for those who knowingly ‘make any communication for commercial purposes’ on the World Wide Web ‘that is available to any minor and that includes any material that is harmful to minors,’ those under 17.”
The article added that making a site more difficult for a child to view could prevent this.
“It is an acceptable defense to block access by minors by requiring an adult access code, a credit card, an identification number or similar measures,” the article said.
The law resulted after the Supreme Court overturned the Communications Decency Act [CDA] in 1997, and will be ruled on later this year.
UW-Madison political science professor Donald Downs said the CDA law aimed to prevent children from viewing material that was “patently offensive [or] prurient to” them.
“[CDA] prohibited sending material knowingly to a source where it could get into the hands of children,” Downs said.
Robert Drechsel, a UW journalism and mass communications and law professor, said this law was one step in the attempt to regulate the Internet.
“This was congress’ first major effort to control indecent material on the Internet,” Drechsel said.
Downs said the CDA was revoked because it may have indirectly penalized adults that rightfully could view material that children could not.
He said the CDA was struck down because it was overly broad and vague, and it prevented adults from viewing something because it might be inappropriate for children.
According to Dreschel, the Supreme Court said the CDA violated the First Amendment.
In revising this law and introducing the Child Online Protection Act, Congress dealt with access children have to pornography on the Internet.
“The vexing question is how to best control children’s access — either purposeful or accidental — to pornographic material on the Internet and facilitate parental supervision without infringing on the First Amendment rights of adults,” Drechsel said.
Regulation walks a fine line between censorship and protecting the people, Drechsel said, and added that censorship may have more consequences.
“Sometimes we have to tolerate something we don’t like, because if we go after it, censorship might be more harmful than the effects of not censoring it,” Downs said. “It’s more often the case than not that the balance will work [this] way.”
Non-legislative solutions also exist.
“The use of filtering software is often seen as an attractive solution, but there are major problems with filtering,” Drechsel said. “Filtering software is insufficiently precise, and thus often fails to filter out truly objectionable material but also often filters out material that no one would want filtered out, such as important educational material, artistic work and health information.”
Drechsel said the provider in charge of filtering also poses some problems.
“It might be one thing if the end user filtered. But do we want an Internet Service Provider to make the filtering decisions for us?” Drechsel said.
The legal battle to protect children from pornography online continues to swell. The Supreme Court has not yet made a ruling on the Child Online Protection Act, but a decision should emerge in the near future.
“We’ll have to wait a few months to find out what the Court decides,” Drechsel said.
