Communications Decency Act
Photograph by Bill Smith1on Flickr.
On June 26, 1997, the Supreme Court Communications Decency Act upheld the Philadelphia court s decision in Reno v. (The New York case, Reno v.
Gonzales, was rejected by a federal court in New Charter Communications York in 2005. The next month, another US federal court in New York struck down the portion of the CDA intended to protect children Communications Decency Act from indecent speech as too broad.
The Supreme Court summarily affirmed that decision in 2006. Congress has made two narrower attempts to regulate children s exposure to Internet indecency since the Supreme Court overturned the CDA. Indecency in TV and radio broadcasting had already been regulated by the Federal Communications Decency Act Communications Commission—broadcasting of offensive speech was restricted to certain hours of the day, when minors were supposedly least likely to be exposed.
The CDA, which affected the Internet and cable television, marked the first attempt to expand regulation to these new media. Passed by Congress on February 1, 1996, Communications Decency Act and signed by President Bill Clinton on February 8, 1996, the CDA imposed criminal sanctions on anyone who It further criminalized the transmission of materials that were obscene or indecent to persons known to be under 18. Free speech advocates, however, worked diligently and successfully to overturn the portion relating to indecent, but not obscene, speech. The relevant sections of the Act were introduced in response to fears that Internet pornography was on the rise.
Effectively, this section immunizes ISPs and other service providers from torts committed by users over their systems, even if the provider fails to take action after actual notice Through the so-called Good Samaritan provision, this section also protects ISPs from liability for restricting access to certain material or giving others the technical means to restrict access to that material. . They argued that speech protected under the First Amendment, such as printed novels or the use of the seven dirty words, would suddenly become unlawful when posted to the Internet.
ACLU, the U.S. ACLU.
A separate challenge to the provisions governing obscenity, known as Nitke v. Shea, was affirmed by the Supreme Court the next day, without a published opinion.) In 2003, Congress amended the CDA to remove the indecency provisions struck down in Reno v.
Violators could be fined and potentially lose their licenses. American Civil Liberties Union, stating that the indecency provisions were an unconstitutional abridgement of the First Amendment right to free speech because they did not permit parents to decide for themselves what material was acceptable for their children, extended to non-commercial speech, and did not define patently offensive, a term with no prior legal meaning.
In 1997, in the landmark cyberlaw case of Reno v. The Internet, however, had only recently been opened to commercial interests by the 1992 amendment to the National Science Foundation Act and thus had not been taken into consideration by previous laws.
First, it attempted to regulate both indecency (when available to children) and obscenity in cyberspace. It was introduced to the Senate Committee of Commerce, Science, and Transportation by Senators James Exon (D-NE) and Slade Gorton (R-WA) in 1995.
The amendment that became the CDA was added to the Telecommunications Act in the Senate by an 84–16 vote on June 14, 1995. As eventually passed by Congress, Title V affected the Internet (and online communications) in two significant ways. Critics also claimed the bill would have a chilling effect on the availability of medical information.
It added protection for online service providers and users from action against them for the actions of others, stating in part that No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider . The Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) was the first notable attempt by the United States Congress to regulate pornographic material on the Internet.
While legal challenges also dogged COPA s successor, the Children s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) of 2000, the Supreme Court upheld it as constitutional in 2004. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was not part of the original Senate legislation, but was added in conference with the House, where it had been separately introduced by Representatives Chris Cox (R-CA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) as the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act and passed by a near-unanimous vote on the floor. Online civil liberties organizations arranged protests against the bill, for example the Black World Wide Web protest which encouraged webmasters to make their sites backgrounds black for 48 hours after its passage, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation s Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign. In Philadelphia on June 12, 1996 a panel of federal judges blocked part of the CDA, saying it would infringe upon the free speech rights of adults.
Second, Section 230 of the Act has been interpreted to say that operators of Internet services are not to be construed as publishers (and thus not legally liable for the words of third parties who use their services). The most controversial portions of the Act were those relating to indecency on the Internet.
