Anti-Porn Child Protection Act Ruled Unconstitutional

Anytime the ACLU gets involved with a case, I always wonder what the motivations behind the organization’s involvement are. In their most recent courtroom victory, the ACLU has defeated a law that was intended to prevent minors from being exposed to pornography on the Internet.

The ACLU convinced a U.S. District Judge in Philadelphia that the already-embattled Child Online Protection Act (COPA) is unconstitutional and violated Americans’ First Amendment rights.

A news parody program called The Half Hour News hour aired the commentary below about the ACLU and its frequent alignments with the less than desirable forces in society today.

The act, which was not being enforced anyway because of other legal challenges, was enacted in 1998 by Congress to slow the appearance of pornography on the Web – especially sites that offered “free samples” of lewd images without any age verification to protect minors.

Judge Lowell Reed agreed with the ACLU when he barred the Government from enforcing the Act. The original intent of the law was to make it illegal for commercial Web sites to make content available via the World Wide Web that is “harmful to minors.” Website owners convicted of violating the act could have been fined up to $50,000 and put in jail for six months.

If COPA sounds familiar to you, its because it was in the news about a year ago when the Justice Department used the act to demand Internet search records from the major search giants, Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Google was the only company to resist the subpenas, and was heralded in the online community for doing so.