By Brian Krebs and David McGuire Washtech.com Staff Writers
Monday, May 13, 2002; 2:03 PM
The U.S. Supreme Court today partially upheld a controversial law that makes it illegal for Web site operators to expose children to
pornography and other material deemed "harmful to minors."
At the heart of today's complex 8-1 ruling was the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a law that would hold Internet content providers criminally responsible if they "allow" children to view adult content online.
The law remains in legal limbo until the lower court reconsiders some of the broader free-speech issues raised by the plaintiffs in the original challenge to the law.
Today's decision supports COPA's reliance on "community standards" to determine what material is harmful to minors - something that the law's opponents say could make the most conservative American community the arbiter of what is considered inappropriate for children to see on the Internet.
The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the constitutionality of the 1998 law. In 1999, a U.S. District Court judge issued a preliminary injunction preventing much of the law from taking effect. In 2000, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that
injunction, ruling unanimously that the community standards test was
unconstitutional.
The ACLU had argued that subjecting material posted on the inherently global Internet to a "community standards" test would effectively force all Web sites to conform to the moral code of the nation's most restrictive community.
That view was embraced by Justice John Paul Stevens, the lone dissenter in today's decision.
"In the context of the Internet, community standards become a sword, rather than a shield," Stevens wrote. "If a prurient appeal is offensive in a puritan village, it may be a crime to post it on the World Wide Web."
The law would have provided a "safe harbor" for adult sites that hid their content behind age-verification screens. The ACLU charged that such restrictions could lead to self-censorship by content providers leery of losing site traffic.
But the Supreme Court acknowledged that such issues were not addressed by the appeals court, which tailored its decision to the
community standards provision.
