The Bush administration's top lawyer asked the Supreme Court yesterday to end a five-year legal battle that has prevented enforcement of a federal law designed to keep Internet pornography away from minors.
Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson told the justices that the restrictions on sexually oriented Web sites imposed by the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which was passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998, do not violate free speech.
COPA, which imposes criminal sanctions on commercial Web sites that fail to make a good-faith effort to block access to sexual material that is "harmful" to people younger than 17, is needed to deal with the "menace" of "pervasive and essentially unavoidable Internet pornography that inflicts substantial physical and psychological damage on children," Olson said yesterday during oral arguments in the case.
This is the third time that the court has addressed the question of what Congress may do to limit children's exposure to pornography on the Internet. In 1997, the court struck down a broader law, the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), as a violation of the First Amendment. COPA attempted to fix the CDA's constitutional defects, but it, too, was found unconstitutional in 2000 by the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24683-2004Mar2.html
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