Judge Strikes Down COPA, 1998 Online Porn Law
Well, a ray of sunshine on what was otherwise a gloomy, gray day. A Federal judge has permanently enjoined the Child Online Protection Act - a rather nasty piece of legislation which restricted everyone’s freedoms in the name of ‘protecting the children’. The judge pointed out that software designed to filter websites is easily and cheaply available to parents, and didn’t buy the government’s argument that ‘all that work’ was asking too much of parents.
Folks, in the words of Dee Snider to Tipper Gore - “Being a parent isn’t a reasonable job.” And there’s a very fine line between protecting the children, and infantilizing adults. A line which lately the government has not just stepped across, but BOUNDED over, rather like Tigger bouncing through the hundred acre wood.
What does that mean for us in our business? Well, it means that we don’t have to somehow require “proof” that everyone who visits our sites is over the age of eighteen by requesting a credit card or asking them to electronically sign a document. However, in reality, it doesn’t really change much about how I do business. Here’s the dirty little secret that politicians don’t seem to understand - because they don’t WANT to understand.
I don’t want children to visit my websites. Any of them. And the reason is simple and economically understandable. Children can’t buy my product, and if they’re surfing my sites they are using my resources and bandwidth, costing me money with no chance of me making anything in return. Kids don’t have credit cards so they can’t buy my product - nor would I want them to! To restrict young surfers, I use meta tags that scream to filtering software ‘This is Adult material, get away!’. I BEG parents, please, use filtering software. And I don’t promote any material which I deem promotes violence, or depicts models who are portrayed as being under the age of consent - EVER.
Here’s hoping that as these laws wind their way through our judicial system, they all eventually get struck down and we go back to being a country where the First Amendment Protections really mean something and the president doesn’t consider our constitution “just a piece of paper”.
I hope so.
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