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The net effect of the court allowing enforcement of this law could be seen as a positive.
Think of the bulk of free sites with hardcore material disappearing, a sudden shift towards licensed content instead of Joe Blow stealing some pics and posting them. Granted, if you've got several thousand free sites with anything but extremely softcore content, this would suck - but on a whole I think it would be good for the industry. Weed out fly-by-night webmasters (to an extent).
I'd hope that if the Supreme Court does allow COPA enforcement, some guidelines would be published as to what is and is not 'acceptable'. My fear if COPA is overturned is that Ashcroft and Co. will not simply ignore adult sites, but turn to the vague obscenity laws to prosecute.
Something is going to change. There are simply too many hundreds of thousands of sites on the net with zero intent on keeping children away from them. Public support has changed - it's no longer "free speech is important", but rather "damn smut peddlers spamming my kids AOL account again". No way the notion of "eh... do what you want" is gonna last.
[edit: Three posts and I'm in the family, huh? I'm honored.]
[This message has been edited by Tucks (edited 05-22-2001).]
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