Courts Urged to Uphold Child Online Protection Act >By Rachel Chalmers

Computergram International,  July 21, 1999  

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Sponsors of the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA) have filed a brief urging the US Courts to enforce the proposed legislation. COPA was signed into law by President Clinton last year, but in February, US District Judge Lowell Reed agreed with the ACLU and 17 web publishers that it violates the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. In April, the Department of Justice appealed Reed's decision. Now Senators John McCain and Dan Coats and Representatives Tom Bliley, Michael Oxley and James Greenwood have filed their brief in support of the DOJ's appeal.

They argue that COPA is a valid, narrowly tailored response to a serious problem. The controversial definition of "harmful to minors" is, they say, judicially limited to pornography, and will not cover information about breast cancer and so on as the ACLU and its allies claimed. As for the freedom of speech issue, the sponsors of the Act urge the courts to uphold COPA within the required constitutional parameters. It is, they say, a necessary and least restrictive means of protecting minors from adult pornography.

"This new law would protect children from commercial pornography that is "harmful" to them," the sponsors conclude. "This is a "compelling governmental purpose" of "surpassing importance" that the Supreme Court and other federal and state courts have said legislatures can provide for our most vulnerable citizens. It was the least Congress could do to extend that protection to America's children and grandchildren."

COPYRIGHT 1999 Datamonitor
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning