The Supreme Court has ruled that a US law aimed at shielding children from pornography online violates the constitutional right to free speech. The American ruling is a severe embarrassment to Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, who is trying to introduce such a law here.
US Supreme Court shuts door on Child Online Protection Act
The US Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that a law designed to shield children from pornography on the internet violated the constitutional right to free speech.
The move by the highest court, which let the ruling stand without comment, would appear to mean the end of the road for the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which was passed by Congress in 1998 but never enforced.
Rights groups welcomed the Supreme Court decision not to hear the Bush administration’s appeal of the ban on COPA, with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describing it as a "clear victory for free speech."
The ACLU has been among the groups which filed legal challenges to COPA on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment right to free speech.
"For over a decade the Government has been trying to thwart freedom of speech on the internet, and for years the courts have been finding the attempts unconstitutional," ACLU senior staff attorney Chris Hansen said Wednesday (local time).
"It is not the role of the Government to decide what people can see and do on the internet," he said in a statement.
"Those are personal decisions that should be made by individuals and their families."
"The court’s decision not to review COPA for a third time affirms what we have been saying all along — the Government has no right to censor protected speech on the internet, and it cannot reduce adults to hearing and seeing only speech that the Government considers suitable for children," added ACLU legal director Steven Shapiro.
Leslie Harris, president the Centre for Democracy & Technology (CDT), also praised the Supreme Court for not interfering with the ruling of an appeals court in Pennsylvania in the case.
"We applaud the court’s decision which ends the Government’s quixotic and wasteful 10-year effort to impose an unconstitutional censorship standard on Internet content," Ms Harris said.
COPA was intended to prevent minors from accessing pornographic content on the web but it ran into immediate and repeated legal challenges on free speech grounds.
– from a report by ABC Australia