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Courts stuck down a law that was established in 1998 that made it a crime to for website operators to allow children access to what was deemed 'harmful'. With new increases in technology, software programs to protect children from internet pornography sites, Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. decided that it is the parents responsibility to monitor what their children are able to access on the internet, and that the burden falls back to the parent or guardian of the child, and not on the website owners themselves.

The four-week long court case, in an 84-page decision, determined that the 1998 law, which would have made it illegal to allow children to view pornography and would have required a credit card number or some other means of verifying the viewers legal age status prior to viewing the content, was an outdated law, now that advance technology and software programs were available to parents.

Originally, the law could have imposed fines up to $50,000 and up to six months in prison for website operators who violated the law. In 2004, a temporary injunction against the 1998 law was granted, based on the premise that the likelihood of the law being struck down was great, and therefore, the law was put on hold.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was one of the loudest voices against the 1998 law, stating that the law, which was part of the Online Child Protection Act, was vague and could have a potentially devastating effect on free speech. Thursday, the judge agreed that free speech was more important in the scheme of things than this law, and that parents now had tools to protect their children from viewing anything on the internet that might 'cause harm.'

One of the problems with the law, and those speaking on the side of the pornography industry and website operators of pornographic material sites, was that the law that was established was only regulating United States based websites, and therefore, unfairly hurting pornographic internet business in the U.S.

Non-U.S. based pornographic websites did not have to comply with the U.S. laws for verifying a website viewer's age, and therefore, the argument was made that any child who wanted to view pornography could still do so, simply by access a website that was not based in the U.S.

In 1996, there was a law before congress to ban internet pornography in the U.S. completely, but the law never made it very far before, in1997, the proposed law was ruled unconstitutionally unfair to adult's rights.

In 2000, a law was passed that required educational facilities that taught minors to install filters to prevent access by students and staff to any websites with pornographic material, and that law was again upheld in 2003. Whether a law will be proposed to require the same of parents remains to be seen, but there is an indication that this may be proposed at some point in the future.

For now, the ruling has clearly established that the government cannot control internet pornography under the constitutional right to free speech, leaving the responsibility of protecting children from internet pornography in the hands of those responsible for raising the children.

Learn more about this author, Michelle L Devon.
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