Free speech advocates have their hands full with their appeal against a controversial internet censorship law. The second day of the lawsuit against the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) saw CNET’s VP and editor-in-chief, Christopher Barr, Mitch Tepper of the Sexual Health Network, and PlanetOut founder Tom Rielly take the stand for the ACLU and its free-speech allies. COPA requires commercial web sites hosting material deemed harmful to children to make their users provide a credit card number as proof of age. Sites that do not observe this requirement would face a $100,000 fine. COPA has been stigmatized as the successor to the ill-fated Communications Decency Act of 1996. CNet’s Barr said he believed some of the content available on CNet might be prohibited under COPA. He was also concerned that his company could be held responsible for offensive material at sites to which it linked. Tepper said that COPA is too vaguely phrased for him to be able to tell what types of content it covers – a body blow at those who tried to frame the act to be extremely precise, and thus not in breach of the First Amendment. The Sexual Health Network’s Tepper pointed out that his site describes sexual techniques for people with physical disabilities Some individuals might deem such material harmful to minors within the meaning of the act. Requiring the sites’ users to identify or register themselves would frighten away those who depend upon the anonymity and confidentiality of the service. This point was repeated by PlanetOut’s Rielly, who explained that many of those who visit his site are teenagers seeking information they would not be likely to receive from other sources. COPA’s insistence on establishing proof of age would make it impossible for these young teenagers to use PlanetOut in the way it was intended. Finally a technical expert, Dan Farmer of the ISP Earthlink, said the use of credit cards as verification systems can create security risks for web sites. Such systems would also be costly both for publishers and their readers, since whether credit card transactions were processed or not, sites would still incur service charges. While fighting for free speech, the publishers who are supporting the ACLU have been forced into a rearguard action to protect the confidentiality of what they say are commercially sensitive business plans. Justice witness Brian Blonder, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, threatened to disclose what the companies said were trade secrets. It was the ACLU, normally an opponent of censorship, that suggested closing the courtroom proceedings altogether. The Associated Press, USA Today, MSNBC and Wired News immediately protested. Finally US District Judge Lowell Reed ruled that the publishers do not have to present specifics about how COPA might interfere with their rights to free speech. The DoJ was due to kick off its defense of COPA on Friday January 22. As well as Blonder, it plans to call Dan Olsen, a professor of computer science at Brigham Young University, who will claim that implementing COPA is technically and economically feasible; Laith Paul Alsarraf of adultcheck.com, a vendor of adult IDs to the porn industry, who will maintain that registration is cheaper and easier than COPA’s opponents claim; and Air Force special agent Damon Hecker, who will describe the extent of sexually explicit content available on the web.
