COPA Suffers Yet Another Court Defeat 322
A US federal appeals court today struck down COPA, the Child Online Protection Act, a Clinton-era censorship law that the Justice Department has been struggling to get implemented for a decade. (The ACLU filed suit as soon as COPA was signed in 1998 and won an immediate injunction.) The battle has made it to the Supreme Court twice, and the DoJ has essentially never gotten any satisfaction out of the courts. This was the case for which the DoJ famously went trolling for search histories. In the ruling issued today, the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower-court ruling that COPA violates the First Amendment because it is not the most effective way to keep children from visiting adult Web sites. The law would require sites to check visitors' ages, e.g. by taking a credit card, if the site contained any material that is "harmful to minors," whatever that means.
Harm to children (Score:5, Interesting)
What causes more harm to Children? Porn or Religion?
I see reports of kids dying because their parents were too superstitious to take them to a doctor because of their religion. i have never heard of a kid dying because he watched a porno movie or read a dirty book.
Oh wait... These are Metaphorical Children. They don't obey natural laws, only metaphorical ones.
Re:Harm to children (Score:5, Interesting)
Any lawyers in the house? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is/Was this the same law that required me to essentially ban anyone under 13 from my (kid friendly) forum website because I don't have the resources necessary to manage all those permission forms?
The problem isn't really in parent's hands (Score:3, Interesting)
See, let's start with little Johnny that watches lots of porn. Hard-core stuff. Ends up getting out of high school thinking that (a) wimmen like surprises, like rape, and (b) wimmen don't like him. Yes, (b) is a logical corallary to (a) but we won't go there. How did little Johnny get so twisted? Simple: nobody ever paid any attention to him and let him go off and figure stuff out for himself, like relating to other people. In today's world this is pretty easy to imagine.
Whose problem is it exactly when little Johnny acts out his hard-core rape fantasies? His parents? His teachers? Nope. It is your problem and mine because we have to live in the society that little Johnny is living in.
Is little Johnny fit for society? Who exactly is going to take care of little Johnny if he doesn't fit in society and can't be left alone with anything female? Couldn't we just give him back to his parents? Sadly, we can't lock him up until he accumulates enough rapes with witnesses to actually get a conviction. And just locking him up for a while isn't going to "fix" him - we have to deal with little Johnny for life and thousands more like him. How did it get this way? Because as a society we were content to assume his parents were responsible adults and could foresee what would happen if they were not effective parents. We all assumed that "the village" would help raise Johhny right even if his parents were incapable. What we got was a disaster and a human hardly worth the name.
What is the answer? I don't know. But for parents using a TV or computer as a babysitter and ignoring the kid results in damage. Damage to the kid and damage to society. We are currently dealing with that damage today, mostly in the inner cities but believe me, it isn't confined there by any means. Would COPA be a solution? Not really, but it couldn't hurt in this sort of case. Where would we go for a real solution? I think we need to think about some points:
Face it, today in the US a good deal of our troubles are parents that dump their children on "the system" and hope for the best because they haven't a clue. Or haven't the motivation. How exactly do we fix this problem? It isn't by hoping parents will do a better job. We have been hoping they would since the 1960s or even before that and it hasn't happened.
Give them what now?... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah because going to an unsavory website and requiring access by giving them my credit card information without actually buying anything is a GREAT idea. I can't think of anyone I trust more with my credit information than a pr0n site... Not to mention a child would never be able to get access to a credit card, or the pr0n stashed in their parents' sock drawer, or saved on the hard drive, or on the recent documents list, or...
Re:BUSH = HITLER (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Any lawyers in the house? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not a lawyer, but yeah. I was in Potter fandom for a while and remember COPPA coming up in the weirdest instances, and kids coming on the forums and bragging about being 12 (and wondering how they got out of instant ban.) End result was that most of the big sites that allowed kids under 13 already had a legal staff. Here's the actual bill: link [ftc.gov]
Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)
It's too bad there's no longer a land where a like-minded group of people could flee to escape the persecution of the short-sighted and the weak-willed who will trade their essential liberty for temporary and false security.
Re:BUSH = HITLER (Score:3, Interesting)
It is in most governments' interest to infringe on your basic rights, and they are all guilty of it. Having said this, Bush's administration is definitely responsible for more evil things than any president in recent history, so why not bash him for it? It's only fair. If we don't do that, all evilness would be made equal, and any president would do as he wishes, because the other bastard also did so-and-so.
The question is: why does a man get in the news - and be forced to lie to a nation - for a blowjob, while he is responsible for something like this that nobody probably cared about? Child protection acts are awfully boring as a topic I guess. Nobody really wants to think about the children.
Re:Good (Score:2, Interesting)
Is the policy of the law stupid? Yes. Credit card to check for age? Idiotic. Is it a constitutional violation? No. A thousand times no. It falls under the very purpose of the constitution.
Re:The Hypocrisy is Stunning (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, you don't tend to have organisations and schools preaching at children that they must believe in Santa Claus. You don't have "Santa Claus" schools specifically set up for that purpose. I imagine those are the sorts of things he meant.
FWIW, I wouldn't want to criminalise someone for exposing a child to religion. But I do think it's ridiculous that people are obsessed with censoring (or in some cases, criminalising possession of) media "because a child might see it", yet this is not applied to religion. On the contrary, some of the same people who freak out that a 17 year old might see a nipple or hear a swear word seem happy to preach religion at other people's small children.
Re:Harm to children (Score:2, Interesting)
What causes more harm to Children? Porn or Religion?
I see reports of kids dying because their parents were too superstitious to take them to a doctor because of their religion. i have never heard of a kid dying because he watched a porno movie or read a dirty book.
Oh wait... These are Metaphorical Children. They don't obey natural laws, only metaphorical ones.
I find this comment to cruel. Then again, it was probably designed to be provocatively worded.
What causes more harm to Children? Porn or Religion? Presumably porn. Or, in your religion bashing fest, did you forget about child porn, that children are exploited over it? Beyond that, pornography has been demonstrated to cause psychological harm to its viewers (especially at a young age): for instance, they had an increased probability to trivialize rape. I'm to lazy to look up a study so please refer to this (http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/25/2148229) thread where some posters put it in perspective.
Your comments about children not being taken to hospitals are crazy. Please notice that insane people do insane things which some times have something to do with religion. If you specify what religion you feel is responsible for their action (that is, encourages such actions), I'm sure we can debunk the myth (crazy cults, including $cientology, don't count).
- An annoyed Person
Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Not too long ago I returned from just driving randomly around the country. The places where they didn't sell alcohol (or sold it in a variety of ways that pretty much prevented me from easily getting some) always had people who were eager and willing to tell me where I could go to buy alcohol. Dry towns make for drunk drivers... That was my observation at least.
Yep. Look at Germany, open container laws all over the country (as long as you're not driving) beer and wine available at 16, hard alcohol available at 18... and little to no drunk driving. Why? Because they punish you at the WHEEL rather than at the bar.
(And yeah, I love me some alcohol, so I pretty much got drunk in the majority of the states.)
I hear this gets you an achievement on XBox Live...
Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Elaborate? Which societies hold everyone accountable when a child goes wrong, and how are they 'doing just fine'? By what standard?
Logical fallacy. There are consequences, dire ones.
Again, elaborate! How is 'society' held accountable? Individuals may suffer, and 'society' as a hole may be downgraded by some standard, but is society 'punished'. No it is not. Society is irresponsible because 'society' is an abstract and is therefore not capable of being held accountable for it's actions or inactions. Period.
I don't think you understand what that means.
I'm sure I do understand what it means, and what it means is that somehow 'society' has the responsibility of making the world safe for children. Fat chance of that. We've already established that society has no real responsibility. So let's propose that society has real, enforcible responsibilities. Even if that were the case, then what's expected of society is impossible. In all my life I've never seen an abstract society jump in and save a child from drowning because a janitor forgot to lock the pool gate.
You say, "The janitor should be punished." That's hardly correct. It was an accident. We all make them, and we will continue to make them as long as there is humanity. I say, "The kid should have been taught to swim by his relatives, and if he wasn't old enough to swim, why was he out of sight of his parents in the first place." The accountable & responsible party in either case is the parents. Not society.
Re:"Childhood" is a recent concept (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm going to call fashionable nonsense on this one. Kind of like how there were never any dark ages or how all knowledge is socially constructed. Sounds pleasant to some nutty professor types for a while, largely because it's counterintuitive, but the fad passes.
Human children are born with exceedingly undeveloped bodies and brains, and take about fifteen years just to become physically and sexually mature. Emotionally you need to learn to live in a more diverse, complex, rapidly changing world every generation. That takes time. The demands of intellectual competence meanwhile have always gotten harder to fulfill with every stage of civilization. Of course periods of childhood / adolescence / apprenticeship are going to get longer as well.
You don't like it, fine. But it's not an American thing: the pattern exists all over the world. Not to mention, as you yourself recognize in calling yourself an old fogey, people have been whining about longer childhoods forever.
We live longer than we ever used to. At sixty you still have about twenty five more to go. Meanwhile we've not managed to invent new stages of life successfully - there are abortive attempts every now and then to introduce a second college education etc, but basically (except for serial monogamy) people live vastly longer lives segmented the essentially same way http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_world's_a_stage [slashdot.org]>Shakespeare did it. Explain to me how that isn't going to make all the stages of life - childhood, education, parenting, middle age, old age - proportionately longer.