Judge puts hold on Child Online Protection Act
The order, issued by U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed, will delay enforcement of the act for 10 days, until Dec. 4. The order may be extended again pending a preliminary injunction hearing tentatively set for Dec. 8.
The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was scheduled to go into effect Friday.
The act, which passed into law when President Clinton signed the federal budget bill, would make it a federal crime to knowingly transmit "for commercial purposes" digital materials deemed "harmful to minors."
Violators would face fines of up to $50,000 and up to six months in prison. The federal government crafted the COPA after its predecessor, the Communications Decency Act, was ruled unconstitutional last year by the Supreme Court.
In that earlier ruling, the court determined that the CDA, which prohibited "indecency" online and applied to all Web sites rather than just commercial ones, violated Americans' First Amendment right to free speech.
But proponents of the new law have argued that the harmful-to-minors standard -- which appears in many state and federal laws -- is much narrower than the indecency standard, and therefore constitutional.
Free-speech concerns continue
Civil libertarians disagree. "This law is nearly identical to the CDA," said Barry Steinhardt, head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The judge's ruling preserved the status quo that speech on the Internet deserves strong protection."
Plaintiffs in the suit include EFF, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Internet Content Coalition. ZDNN publisher Ziff-Davis Inc. is a member of the Internet Content Coalition.
Maria Seminerio and Reuters contributed to this report.