COPA trial begins
As longtime readers of this blog know, Salon and I have both been deeply involved in the ACLU’s challenge to the 1998 Child Online Protection Act from the start, which means this epic has been going on for something like eight years.
Under normal circumstances, the fact that multiple courts have already preliminarily ruled against the law — an Internet censorship bill masquerading as a “protect our kids from porn” measure — should have sounded its death knell a long time ago. But the Bush Justice Department loves its social issues, and instead of folding up its tent based on the preliminary proceedings, Justice has taken the issue to a full trial.
The trial started this week in Philadelphia. Joan Walsh, Salon’s editor, testified Monday. There’s a full transcript of the day’s proceedings available from the ACLU. (Back in 2004 I wrote about the Supreme Court hearing on COPA.) As there’s news on this I’ll keep posting it.
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October 25th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
The government insists that the law applies only to “pornography” and that the three prongs define it. What I fear is that culturally some people would not like the candor with which I, a gay man, “expose myself” (in a pyschological sense) in some of my postings and book (viewable online). The real threat comes cultural disagreement disguised as law.
Why aren’t search engines (Google) and retailers like Amazon explosed when they display entire books without knowing what’s in them?
doaskdotell.com has an index to all my blogs, and pages on COPA (including notes on the 2004 Supreme Court arguments).
I think that content labeling (like ICRA) is really the right way to keep content away from immature visitors, and it would work and be practical if software vendors would work on it and make it much more available, in conjunction with browsers.
Another major concern of mine is the way employers want to look at social networking sites and blogs. Is this a test for social conformity?