Folks its time to keep an eye on this one, it threatens evrything sacred to web users.
http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-6137051.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=newsIn 1998, the U.S. Congress enacted a sweeping Web censorship law that nearly everyone promptly forgot about.
Why? The explanation is simple: The American Civil Liberties Union immediately filed a lawsuit to block the U.S. Justice Department, and a federal judge granted an injunction barring prosecutors from enforcing the law. That injunction has been in place ever since.
But now that could change. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr. in Philadelphia will hear closing arguments in the Child Online Protection Act case, and a ruling is expected by early 2007.
It's unlikely that Reed will lift the injunction, but it is possible. The case has already gone up to the U.S. Supreme Court once, at which point the justices asked Reed to evaluate whether the effectiveness of blocking software had changed in the last few years--a crucial question on which much of the case hinges. (That's because the ACLU argues filterware is a less restrictive means than a Net-censorship law.)
If Reed sides with the Bush administration, mainstream Web publishers will have plenty to worry about.
COPA makes it a federal crime to knowingly post Web pages that have sexually explicit material that's "harmful to minors." Violators could be fined up to $50,000 and imprisoned for up to six months.
That affects far more than just porn producers--even news organizations publishing articles and videos that could be deemed "harmful to minors" might be in trouble.
The worry for most folks is the ever widening scope that could be tagged on to this bill, whilst we all do our best to protect children the web is not a childrens playgound for many reasons and adequate supervision of those using it is and usage of a filtering program has always been the best way to protect them from misspelled or misleading links to objectionable material.
