IP: post on CDA

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Thursday, June 26, 1997;
 10:36 a.m. EDT 


WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congress violated free-speech rights when it tried to
curb smut on the Internet, the Supreme Court ruled today. In its first
venture into cyberspace law, the court invalidated a key provision of the
1996 Communications Decency Act. 


Congress' effort to protect children from sexually explicit material goes
too far because it also would keep such material from adults who have a
right to see it, the justices unanimously said. 


The law made it a crime to put adult-oriented material online where
children can find it. The measure has never taken effect because it was
blocked last year by a three-judge court in Philadelphia. 


``We agree with the three-judge district court that the statute abridges
the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment,'' Justice John Paul
Stevens wrote for the court. 


``The (Communications Decency Act) is a content-based regulation of
speech,'' he wrote. ``The vagueness of such a regulation raises special
First Amendment concerns because of its obvious chilling effect on free
speech.'' 


``As a matter of constitutional tradition ... we presume that governmental
regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the
free exchange of ideas than to encourage it,'' Stevens wrote. 


Sexually explicit words and pictures are protected by the Constitution's
First Amendment if they are deemed indecent but not obscene. 


His opinion was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy,
David H. Souter, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. 


Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor agreed
that the law was unconstitutional in that it would restrict adults' access
to material they otherwise would be entitled to see. Writing for the two,
O'Connor said they would invalidate the law only in those circumstances. 


Today's ruling was the high court's first decision involving the rapidly
expanding global computer network, which is thought to connect as many as
40 million people using more than 9.4 million computers worldwide. 


Internet users can use e-mail to communicate with individual people, join
``chat rooms,'' send messages to automatic mailing lists and ``surf'' the
World Wide Web for information stored in other computers. 


In defending the law, the Clinton administration argued that Internet
technology lets children go online to find sexually explicit material like
that in Hustler and Playboy magazines. 


Stevens said the law is too vague and, in seeking to protect children,
trampled on adults' rights. 


In an earlier case, Stevens noted, the court said that a restriction on
speech ``amounted to burning the house to roast the pig. The CDA, casting a
far darker shadow over free speech, threatens to torch a large segment of
the Internet community.'' 


The law made it a crime to put ``patently offensive'' words or pictures
online where they could be found by children. Violators could get up to two
years in prison and a $250,000 fine. 


The law would allow sexually oriented material to be put online if access
were limited to people using credit cards or adult-access codes. The
measure imposed no restrictions on indecent material sent from computers
outside the United States. 


The law was challenged by a variety of groups including the American
Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, America Online,
the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apple Computer and the AIDS
Education Global Information System. 


Those groups said the law would restrict access not only to smutty words
and pictures but to discussion of issues including safe sex, homosexuality
or prison rape. 


They contended parents can use computer blocking devices to keep
adult-oriented material away from their children and leave other people
free to view it. The government cannot restrict the adult population to
seeing only material that is appropriate for children, the organizations'
lawyer told the court during arguments in March. 


The groups did not challenge provisions making it illegal to provide
obscene material on the Internet. 


Government lawyers argued that parents who want to keep sexually explicit
material away from their kids might be scared away from the Internet
without the law's restrictions. 


A three-judge federal court in Philadelphia ruled last year that the law
wrongly would chill adults' right of access to sexual material that may be
inappropriate for children. The law also was struck down by a three-judge
federal court in New York. 


Today, the Supreme Court upheld the Philadelphia court's ruling. 


In describing the new global medium, Stevens said that through chat rooms,
``any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that
resonates farther than it could from any soapbox.'' 


Stevens said the government's argument that offensive material on the
Internet was driving people away was ``singularly unpersuasive,'' adding
that the growth of the Internet has been ``phenomenal.'' 


O'Connor's opinion said she would have voted to uphold provisions that
applied to communication of indecent material when someone knew all the
recipients were minors. 


The case is Reno vs. ACLU, 96-511.