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September 27, 2002CBLDF Joins ACLU in New Challenge to COPAThe Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has joined the American Civil Liberties Union and several other cyber-rights groups and publishers in trying to halt governmentally imposed censorship on the Internet.
An Amici Curiae (friend of the court) brief was filed by the ACLU on August 28th with the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in conjunction with numerous other organizations including the CBLDF, in an attempt strike down the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) as unconstitutional. The aim of COPA is to protect minors from sexually explicit material on the Internet by assigning criminal penalties to any commercial material that is harmful to minors. COPA also burdens the providers of the material with the responsibility of either using technology like credit card verification of age, or removing it from the Internet entirely. "Earlier this year the Supreme Court already recognized that COPA is problematic for free speech online. In joining this Amicus brief we hope that the bill is stricken entirely, as its proposed penalties and restrictions on free speech in an online environment could have a severe chilling effect on the evolution of comics online," says CBLDF Director Charles Brownstein. COPA was originally passed in October of 1998, and immediately faced harsh criticisms from the ACLU. The Federal District Court in Philadelphia issued an injunction preventing government enforcement of COPA in February of 1999. In June of 2000, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found COPA unconstitutional on the grounds that a clause determining obscenity through a test of community standards "would essentially require every Web communication to abide by the most restrictive community's standards." In February of 2001, The Justice Department appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Third Circuit's injunction. On May 13th, 2002, the Supreme Court upheld the injunction and sent it back to the Third Circuit, which will either issue another decision, or send it back to a trial court. The brief discusses in detail a report released in May of 2002 by the National Academy of Sciences on behalf of congress. This study, entitled "Youth, Pornography, and the Internet," found that there is no technology in existence that could censor sexually explicit material for children without also reducing the quantity of protected speech readily available to adults on the Internet. The study also found that approximately 75% of sexually explicit commercial sites were located outside of the U.S., and can therefore operate independent of COPA. Both the "Youth, Pornography and the Internet" report and the brief emphasize that there are more effective, less restrictive alternatives to COPA readily available to Internet consumers. Both the COPA report and the National Academy of Sciences report found at home filtering and blocking technologies more effective in protecting children from explicit material. They also promote Internet literacy and education, as well as governmental incentives for industry self-regulation. "There are better ways to protect the intellectual development of children than government intervention," Brownstein says. "COPA would restrict the intellectual freedom of adults in the guise of protecting the youth, which is unacceptable. We hope that the arguments made in this brief demonstrate to the court that there are better solutions than COPA that would allow children to safely navigate the Internet and adults to take full advantage of the medium in pursuit of intellectual freedom. These solutions would also protect the rights of cartoonists as they continue to explore the frontiers of Web comics." Final report of the COPA commission or in PDF format "Youth, Pornography, and the Internet" or in PDF format
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The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1986 as a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights for members of the comics community. Donations and inquiries should be directed to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. For additional information, call 413-268-7776 or e-mail the CBLDF staff. 271 Madison Avenue, Suite 1400 Web design and site maintained by Eric Griffith / Squished Frog Productions. |