COPA Suffers Yet Another Court Defeat

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.

Good

Parents, it's your job to watch your kids, not anybody else's.

Re:Good

Most parents would agree with you. Unfortunately, there are some very vocal and influential people who don't just want to "protect" their own kids, they want to protect everybody's.

Also, this is not entirely about "protecting the children". People wouldn't be so noisy about keeping something away from the kids if they weren't actually offended by it themselves. But just being offensive is no longer enough, by itself, to justify censorship, either legally or in the minds of most people. So it has to be about The Children.

Personally, I would like to see children protected — but not from porn. The fact is, I just don't see the harm in kids seeing graphic sex. It's not like it's not something they won't need to learn about eventually. On the other hand, it bothers the hell out of me that children are exposed to so much violence in their entertainment. And not just violence, but violence separated from any kind of emotional context. That cannot be a good thing.

Re:Good

Careful son, that's commie talk.

Re:Good

By idiotic, unenforceable laws that anyone but a mental retard knows is a violation of the Constitution and is going to get kicked out (after, of course, costing all the parties involved a shitload of attorney's fees)?

This had absolutely nothing to do with protecting children or any other vulnerable group. It's called pandering. The politicians that enact it do indeed hope that their constituents are mental retards.

Re:Good

Politicians understand politics. They know that by trotting out "Think of the children", any numbskull with kids will vote for them "because our precious baby will be hurt" if they don't. Politics and the law are two different things. Politicians write the law (well, some of them do, other times industry writes it for them and they just sign off on it), but they don't necessarily expect it'll get enforced. Just that they can say "I voted for a bill protecting America's children" when election time rolls around.

Re:Good

Well then, I hope I can rest assured that you will be in the 2008 United States presidential election? Since you seemingly have a firmer grasp on politics then those that have devoted much more time and effort into that area of life.

I think that is the problem. You think the Constitution is a political issue.

Re:Good

I was referring to your line "violation of the constitution" that chumps like you bark out whenever any law is enacted, ever. You don't have a right to murder. You don't have a right to steal. You don't have a right to trespass. You don't have a right to rape. "Essential Liberty" does not include exposing children to pornographic material.

Straw man arguments are lies.

Re:Good

You assume that preventing children from seeing 'things that will harm them' online is a means of protecting them. It isn't, of course, not that this law would do that anyway.

What would protect children more than anything else would be stiff penalties for lawmakers who pass laws later found to be unconstitutional. Something on the order of losing your pension. They know what they are doing, and it is time we held them responsible somewhere other than on the campaign trail.

Re:Good

Damn straight I want politicians afraid to pass laws. They should debate it, talk to judges, talk to lawyers, and for god's sake think about these laws before they pass them.

Re:Good

The way to protect children is to world-proof them, not by trying to child-proof the world.

Re:Good

True but a society must also take care to protect it's most vulnerable members.

That's a laugh. The reason why 'society' can't take care of anything, much less it's most vulnerable members is because 'society' is incapable of shouldering responsibility. How do you punish 'society' for every kid that joins a gang or drowns in a pool? If 'society' is charged with a portion of the responsibility of raising a child, what are the consequences of shirking that responsibility? There are none, therefore the responsibility of society is a myth, and so is the idea that society 'takes care of' anything.
For each child there are a select few people who have an actual responsibility to rear that child. Family, teachers, coaches, etc. These people aren't 'society', they are part of a local community, not America as a whole. These people have real world consequences to face when they don't live up to their responsibilities.
Logically, "It takes a village to raise a child." is a ridiculous farce when that "village" is the whole United States & it's Federal Government. The only thing the "village to raise a child" philosophy has done to child rearing is to lessen the consequences when those who should be responsible aren't.

Re:Good

Or... Realize that it is stupid to "protect" kids from the internet. Now, granted you don't want your kid talking to MrSerialRapist997 on AIM, but some of the things that are censored are absolutely pointless. For example, its OK if an 18 year old swears once in a while, but a 10 year old shouldn't? It is totally OK for an 18 year old to play a game in which you kill people, but not a 16 year old? Really if censoring content is all people use to judge parenting ability, then that is just sad. Now, I think that if you are say, starving your kids, they should be relocated, but just because a kid can say some swear words, plays some violent video games and have seen naked people, doesn't make the parenting bad and our society needs to realize that.

Re:Good

Well, call me a bastard, but keeping kids off the internet would not have helped you in the least. If parents are doing a bad job, this is not society's fault. Your father was a fuck up and deserves to end up in jail. However, we rely on other people to notice and report those things. Ultimately, you cannot punish society because your father did a bad job.

tl;dr Censored tubes would not help your situation.

Get off my credit card!

Finally. Now my children don't have to keep bugging me for my credit card when they want to visit adult sites.

Next stop: Cuomo

Great, now maybe they can get New York's attorney general from implmenting the same law through the back door.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080721/1545501748.shtml [slashdot.org]">Techdirt's latest on the topic

Harm to children

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

If they really wanted to protect children, they would ban things like stoves, weights, cars etc, because they can and do hurt children or enable the hurting of children. And they are not even just dirty pictures, real actual objects that in the right hands can hurt a child. To be safe a list should be made and all of these things banned no matter what the cost. Think of the children!

Hey!

My children ARE porn stars, you insensitive clod!

Love,
Chris Matthews

ID

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.

Stupid laws like this is the reason we have so much Identity theft here in the US. The moment that people think that giving out your credit card number to some site just to say, register for a blog, or view some porn, is normal, is the moment that even more scam sites will emerge.

It was an absolutely stupid idea to check anything with a credit card when you don't know even *who* that is going to half the time. And what the card is being used for.

Put the computer next to Mommy.

Fuck parental controls. If you believe that your children are not old enough to "surf" on their own, then just put the computer next to you while your children use it.

"Parenting" - it doesn't end at birth.

Re:What!

Fuck the children!

Re:What!

Fuck the children!

George Carlin [youtube.com] FTW.

Well then

I didn't know that Michael Jackson had a slashdot account?

Re:What!

Pen island [penisland.net]. Who represents [whorepresents.com]. Please, hold your applause.

Re:The problem isn't really in parent's hands

Licenses and education required for breeding.

Sure. As long as I, and only I, get to decide who gets the license and who doesn't. Remember, the country is currently run by jeezmoid fantatics who believe - literally - in forced breeding.

Real penalties for not getting help when you can't parent your offspring properly.

Sure. With a very precise definition of what constitutes "getting help," which will involve getting it from some government office (who else could we trust?). Said office will be open 24 hours a day in affluent, mostly white neighborhoods, and one hour a month in poor, mostly non-white neighborhoods. Of course.

End absent-parent child support - no amount of money paid to the mother makes up for lack of a responsible two-parent family. If you can't be bothered with birth control you get to live with the results of your inattentiveness.

Unless, of course, you are a man, in which case you obviously should have no responsibility whatsoever for where you dip your wick. (Yes, that is exactly what you just said - live with the results, but only if you are a woman.)

Oh, and, BTW, get ready for the tax increases, since all those women will be on welfare. Except, of course, you'd rather let them literally starve. I mean, really, it's not like women are people or anything, right?

Holding parents responsible for the actions of their children, really. This means that when the 10-year-old kills a neighbor child the parents and the child are responsible. Today often as not the child gets some slap on the wrist punishment because of their age and the parents get nothing. How could you be an effective parent and not know your kid is seriously screwed up when a 10-year-old kills someone?

Hold the parents responsible in exactly what way? Put them in prison? More tax increases. Plus, more tax increases to take care of their other kids.

Undoubtably this means more "community resources" and "social workers" to help failing parents.

Which is to say, more taxes. Lots more taxes. And, if so many parents aren't capable of raising their kids properly, where are you going to find social workers who can? If we can train social workers to raise other people's kids, why can't we use the same money to train parents to raise their own, and then no pay them middle class wages for the rest of their working lives?

But we are either going to spend the money on the front end or the back end. Right now you can check the prisons for the results of dealing with the problem on the back end.

You appaerently want to put more people in prison. Then, you turn around and decry how many people are in prison.