Anti-Internet Porn Law Was Struck Down
A U.S. federal court has made a decision and ruled on Thursday that a 1998 law, which was designed to block children from viewing Internet pornography, violates the U.S. Constitution’s free speech protections right. Apparently the ruling sided with a challenge that was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had argued that the provisions of the Child Online Protection Act were too restrictive for most people.
Judge Lowell Reed of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia wrote in his ruling that while he deeply sympathized with the goal of restricting minors from seeing pornography, other means that were less restrictive of free speech, such as commercial software filters, were available to block pornographic content.
The Child Online Protection Act made it a crime for any person to provide minors access to “harmful material” over the Internet. Violators could be fined up to $50,000 and imprisoned for up to 6 months.