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A 13-year legal drive to shield children from pornography on the Internet ended in defeat today when the Supreme Court let the Child Online Protection Act die quietly.

The measure, which never went into effect, made it a crime to put sexually explicit material on a website for commercial gain unless the sponsor used some means, such as requiring a credit card, to keep out minors.


It was repeatedly blocked from taking effect on free-speech grounds by judges, including by the Supreme Court in 2004. The justices had also voided an earlier, even broader law passed in 1996 that prohibited "indecency" on the Web.

The outcome preserves the Web as a wide-open forum for free expression. It also leaves to parents the duty to install software filters if they wish to block pornography on their home computers.

The judges in Philadelphia who struck down the law last year called these filters an "equally effective" means of protecting children from pornography on the Web.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... 7091.story

Ironically, it was the liberal judges originally that ruled that the parents have the duty to make sure kids don't get to porn, while the conservatives thought a federal law was needed...

Thank God....seriously, one more example of American's wanting the government to raise their children.......since it deals with pronography, can I assume it was a ultra-right religious (ie; Republican) group backing it? Or is this the work of an untra-left (ie; Democrat) Women's Rights group? As you can see, both parties are infected with groups who would take away your freedoms if left to their own agendas....

dbackjon wrote:Ironically, it was the liberal judges originally that ruled that the parents have the duty to make sure kids don't get to porn, while the conservatives thought a federal law was needed...

Thanks for answering my question....