Internet Pornography, the ACLU, and Congress Essay

Internet Porn, the ACLU, and Congress Ashcroft vs. ACLU, 00-1293, deals with a challenge to the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which Congress passed in 1998. The law, which is the subject of this essay, attempts to protect minors from exposure to Internet pornography by requiring that commercial adult websites containing indecent material that is harmful to minors use age-verification mechanisms such as credit cards or adult identification numbers.(Child) An earlier version of the law -- the 1996 Communications Decency Act -- was struck down as an unconstitutional restriction of free speech when challenged by the ACLU; the 1998 version attempted to address the constitutional concerns by limiting its scope to†¦show more content†¦Beeson argued before the court that if COPA goes into effect, her clients, and others like them, would censor themselves by keeping certain material off the Web. What its effectively going to do is drive a certain category of speech protected for adults from the marketplace of ideas that is the Web, Beeson said. The governments brief claims that COPAs age verification mechanisms are constitutional because they parallel state display laws that require local stores to place pornographic material that is harmful to minors behind blinder racks, in sealed wrappers, in opaque covers or behind the counter -- laws that have been upheld by state and appellate courts. At oral argument, the justices questions focused on how the community standards requirement could apply to the Internet: Would it be possible for a North Carolina jury ... to decide whether a particular pornographic transmission would offend the standards of Las Vegas or New York City? Justice Antonin Scalia asked Solicitor General Theodore Olson. Olson replied that juries should be instructed to use a national standard when evaluating whether online material is harmful to minors. 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