High court to revisit online-porn law
WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 — The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to revisit the thorny question of how to protect children from online smut without resorting to unconstitutional censorship.
THE CASE ASKS whether, in the name of children, the law restricts too much material that adults have the right to see or buy. On a more practical level, the court will decide whether the government can require some form of adults-only screening system to ensure children cannot see material deemed harmful to them.
This is the second time in as many years that the high court has reviewed an Internet pornography law passed by Congress in 1998 but never enforced.
The American Civil Liberties Union, representing booksellers, artists, explicit Web sites and others, challenged the Child Online Protection Act as an unconstitutional damper on free speech.
The Bush administration appealed to the high court, arguing that children are “unprotected from the harmful effects of the enormous amount of pornography on the World Wide Web.”
Nothing really further to add, I suppose, other than to register my amusement at the government’s continued claim of an “enormous amount of pornography on the World Wide Web”, which for some reason makes me laugh. Ah, if only there was a study that had evidence to back up that claim…
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