ACLU fighting for freedom of speech on the net (and against COPA)
 

New Trial Begins in Defense of Online Free Speech

Blogging from the COPA Trial

ACLU attorneys and clients blog about the testimony, the issues and a few moments of absurdity in the COPA trial:

"...In that gap falls a great range of speech on topics. It includes speech about whether it is okay to be gay. It includes fine art that happens to involve nudes. It involves sex ed advice geared toward teenagers who may be too embarrassed to ask anyone else."?ACLU Attorney, Catherine Crump

"The government's opening argument, which previewed their theory of the case, proceeded as a kind of syllogism: (1) we all know that COPA was intended to target only "commercial pornography"; (2) plaintiffs, who provide sexual but indisputably valuable material, are not commercial pornographers; (3) ergo, plaintiffs are crying wolf about their fear of prosecution under COPA. There's a hole in this argument: COPA never uses the words "commercial pornography"; it broadly targets descriptions or depictions of sexual acts or nudity. In fact, the word "pornography" has no legal significance?it's in the eye of the beholder."?Ben Wizner, ACLU Attorney

Read more at blog.aclu.org
The ACLU's fight against Internet censorship stretches back a decade and continues as we return to court for the latest round.

Congress first attempted to censor the Internet in 1996, when it passed the Communications Decency Act. The law criminalized "indecent" speech online. The ACLU sued, arguing that the law abridged the First Amendment. All nine Supreme Court justices agreed and struck down the law.

The legal battle continues with our challenge to the "Child Online Protection Act" (COPA) which would impose draconian criminal sanctions, including five-figure penalties and months of imprisonment, for online material acknowledged as valuable for adults but judged "harmful to minors." The law was signed by President Clinton in 1998 and has never been enforced.

"This case is about speech. It is not the role of the government to decide what people can see and use on the Internet," said lead counsel Chris Hansen, ACLU Senior Staff Attorney. "Those are personal decisions that should be made by individuals and their families. Congress does not have the right to censor information on the Internet. Americans have the right to participate in the global conversation that happens online every moment of every day."

For this latest round of a nearly 10-year court battle, a broad range of clients from the Internet world have joined in the challenge, including Salon.com, Nerve.com, UrbanDictionary.com, rappers, writers, painters, video artists, and providers of safer sex information.

The online censorship law has already been held unconstitutional twice, and the Supreme Court upheld the ban on enforcement of the law in June 2004. The Justices, however, also asked a Philadelphia court to determine whether any changes in technology could affect the constitutionality of the statute.

The law will not provide effective protection for parents who are concerned about their children having access to some materials, lacking, among other things, jurisdiction over the more than 50 percent of online speech posted overseas, non-commercial sites and instant messaging, chat rooms or e-mail.

More information, including a full list of plaintiffs, legal documents and the history of Congress' attempts to censor the Internet, is available online at http://www.aclu.org/onlinefreespeech