The ACLU and the Child Online Protection Act
The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was approved by Congress on August 16, 1998. It is the purpose of this essay to demonstrate how the ACLU destroyed this family-oriented act.
Immediately after COPA was signed by the President, the American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of groups representing publishers, Internet Service Providers, journalists, and the technology industry challenged the law in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Federal District Court Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr. issued a temporary restraining order blocking the government from enforcing COPA. On January 11, 1999 both sides filed briefs to argue the constitutionality of the law.(ACLU)
Congress's intention in enacting COPA was to protect minor children from access to free erotic "teaser" pictures available at commercial pornography sites on the World Wide Web. In order to accomplish this governmental interest, the law specifically requires commercial pornography sellers to take a credit card or adult PIN or access number in order to insure that visiting children or teenagers will not be able to see graphic sex pictures on the front pages of commercial pornography WWW. sites. COPA provides punishment of up to six months in jail and a $50,000 fine for each violation.
Plaintiffs alleged in their brief that COPA violates the First Amendment because: (1) It creates an effective ban on constitutionally protected speech by and to adults, and is not the least restrictive means of accomplishing any governmental purpose, and therefore is substantially overbroad; (2) It interferes with the rights of minors to access and view material that is not harmful to them by prohibiting the dissemination of any material with sexual content that is "harmful to minors" of any age, despite the fact that the material will not be "harmful" to all minors; (3) It inhibits an individual's right to communicate and access information anonymously; and (4) It is unconstitutionally vague.
The government argued that COPA is carefully limited in scope to deal only with the problem of "teaser" images that exist on the World Wide Web (meaning the law excludes other Internet, Usenet, e-mail, BBS, chat and online services) and further the government maintained that the law is directed solely at commercial sellers of pornography which is deemed to be "obscene to minors" or "harmful to minors"(meaning all non-commercial, non-profit, educational, governmental and private communications are excluded).
middle of paper ... ... It was just that the Supreme Court believed that this specific case was unconstitutional. The one thing that I find very interesting is that if the Line Item Veto was found unconstitutional in this case then why is it that the president in the past terms has been able to use the Line Item Veto? This type of veto is still around today, and is still used.
...ump up unjustified support for their moral concern. The holding issued in this case violated a very essential part of American law: jurisprudence.
The case was decided 6-3 in favor of Alvarez. The Supreme Court ruled the Stolen Valor Act unconstitutional in violation of the First Amendment. Justices Kennedy, Roberts, Ginsburg and Sotomayor joined in a plurality opinion. The plurality stated that freedom of speech under the First Amendment protects lying and false statements. Although the lies are frowned upon and socially unacceptable, the First Amendment protects those types of statements. With the application of strict scrutiny to this case, the Justices within the plurality found that the Stolen Valor Act was very broad and if it had more specific restric...
COPA makes adult website operators liable for criminal sanctions -- up to $50,000 in fines and six months in jail -- if children are able to access material deemed "indecent," by "contemporary community standards," for those under 16. This raises the sticky issue of what "community" should set the standard for the global world of the Internet.
Obviously, parents want to do the best things they can to protect their children. However, their fears misguide their thinking when it comes to censorship. As Charles Taylor points out, censorship does not only include pornography or excess violence on television, classrooms and libraries all across America can feel its presence. (Taylor) According to the National Coalition against Censorship website Congress passed the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA) in 1981, which provided funds to charitable and religious organizations t...
Constitutionally, the case at first appears to be a rather one-sided violation of the First Amendment as incorporated through the Fourteenth. The court, however, was of a different opinion: "...
The Constitutional issue that was addressed was whether the CDA violated the First Amendment’s protection of free speech (Reno, 1997). The court found that the CDA did infringe upon the freedom of speech protection afforded in the First Amendment. The CDA was an effort to restrict inappropriate material from reaching children under the age of eighteen through the internet. However, the court found that the CDA’s language was too vague and because of that, it ...
William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra While Mark Antony is a great general, one of the three triumvant, it
The Communications Decency Act of 1996 was an outright attempt to censor another form of media believed to "initiate the transmission of, any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another person." It is clear that its main purpose was to protect minors from indecent and potentially harmful material on the internet. The new law planned on imposing strict penalties for using indecent language, or discussing material deemed to be indecent on electronic bulletin boards or Internet chat rooms accessible to children. Section 502 of the Communications Decency Act states that, "Whoever ... uses any interactive computer service to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age, any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs ... shall be fined under Title 1, United States Code, or imprisoned not more than two years...." That basically covers any of the over 13,000 discussion groups, as well as...
Internet is a powerful tool that allows users to collaborate and interact with others all over the world conveniently and relatively safely. It has allowed education and trade to be accessed easily and quickly, but all these benefits do not come without very taxing costs. This is especially true when dealing with the likes of the Internet. Countries in the European Union and Asia have realized this and have taken action against the threat of net neutrality to protect their citizens, even at the cost of online privacy. Internet censorship is required to protect us from our opinions and vices. Every country should adopt Internet censorship and regulation since it improves society by reducing pornography, racism/prejudice, and online identity theft.
The government has passed some laws which are intended to protect children on the internet. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) are to give protection for children who are accessing the internet. There are requirements and protective information for both COPPA and CIPA. Both acts are similar and different in ways to protect children but needed to be done with two acts. There are challenging elements with the COPPA and CIPA to implement in order to be compliant with the acts. There are reasons for the acts to define protection for different age groups such as COPPA defines a child under 13 and CIPA is under 17. When COPPA and CIPA was made into law, there were people who were for the acts but there were also people who opposed the acts.
Censorship is Necessary to Protect Children from the Internet Do you want our future generations being exposed to violence, hate, sexuality, illegal substances, and false information, and then one day think it would be cool or alright to try these things? The internet is filled with dangerous information, that children should never have the freedom to access. Children learn from example, and if they search, watch, or read something on the web that could be potentially dangerous, they could be influenced or curious and think that it would be alright to imitate one day. If our children now are viewing these things, it could mean that future generations could grow to be more violent and our world could become more dangerous than it already is today. Censorship is necessary if we plan on having our kids grow up in the safest environment possible.
Sex, Erotica, nude women, three some, these are some keywords for finding pornography on the internet. The censorship of pornography has a positive affect on the United States of America and is a good thing because pornography leads to crime, pornography has no positive effects on society, and censoring pornography is not against the constitution.
One of the unique challenges to regulating or settling on the appropriate way to regulate is that there is no concrete definition of pornography. While law enforcement bodies such as the police, prosecutors and judges, are accustomed to dealing with issues that are exclusive to the United States, the Internet is a worldwide community with servers and members coming from hundreds of countries. Defining "pornographic content" on a global level has not been easy because of different moral and legal variations. In the United States one type of act may be defined as being "hard-core porn", however, another country could see this act as much less offensive. So while the United States may try to regulate one level of pornography, a person could go find it on a website launched from another country. This is one the problems that is being acknowledged when trying to find a way of dealing with the pornography on the Internet.
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is aptly named, not just because the play centers around these two characters, but also because it encompasses the play’s fixation on the lovers’ oppositional relationship. On the surface level, Antony embodies the Roman ideals of a good, noble man, while Cleopatra represents the hyper-sexualized, dangerous Eastern woman. However, upon further examination both Antony and Cleopatra display complicated internal conflicts that effectively reverse these polar positions repeatedly throughout the play. In this way, the opposition between Antony and Cleopatra that exists on a simple, interpersonal level is echoed by more complicated, internal conflicts within each of these characters on a deeper, more individual level. The tension between the title characters creates the love that draws them together at the same time as it drives them further apart, thus establishing yet another layer of antagonistic relationships within the play. The importance of these oppositional relationships is underlined most starkly in Act II.2. In particular Enobarbus’ speech describing Cleopatra’s beauty functions as one of the greatest statements of the play’s conflicting themes. This speech reflects the antagonistic nature of the play’s central relationships through the invocation of equivalent antagonistic relationships between the violent descriptors used to depict Cleopatra.