Technical-Legal Confluence News

The “Combating Child Exploitation Act of 2008”, S. 1738, was introduced into the 110th Congress by Senator Joe Biden (D-DE), with 19 cosponsors. It is also called the “Protect our Children” Act.

The govtrack link is here.

The bill would set up a Special Counsel for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction within the Office of the Deputy Attorney General and would bolster the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

The summary is here. Note the expansions in what child pornography law would cover, such as expanding the definition of “visual depiction” for purposes of child exploitation crimes to include data capable of conversion into a visual image transmitted by any means, and prohibiting the alteration of a visual depiction of an identifiable minor child so that it depicts child pornography.

The full text is here.

Oprah Winfrey has supported this bill. It is scheduled to vote in the Senate before Sept. 26, 2008.

The main act used to prosecute misrepresentation on the Internet is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, originally passed in 1986, last amended by the Patriot Act in 2001.

The law is USC 1030 and the Cornell Law School reference is here.

The law was intended to prevent computer hacking and unauthorized use of classified information. It has recently attracted attention because it is being used in the Megan Meier Myspace case in Missouri, where a federal prosecution was launched in Los Angeles with an indictment based on this statute, where a woman had impersonated a teenager.

This blog entry will list older “internet censorship” laws that have already been passed and sometimes struck down. Various sources are used to track the text of the bills and court opinions. Govtrack does not seem to have all the materials on older legislation, and the Supreme Court site does not always have the opinions. Findlaw, Cornell Law School, or the Center for Democracy and Technology often has them.

For more recent attempts to legislate in this area, see other postings in the Category.

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The first major Internet “censorship” act was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, S. 652 of the 104th Congress. This incorporated a portion called the “Communications Decency Act if 1996” which was struck down by the Supreme Court in June 1997.

The Govtrack reference is this:

The Congressional Research Service summary is this.
Govtrack does not have the text. However, here is another link at the FCC giving the text.

Here is another reference from Cornell on Section 230, which provides certain critical immunities to ISP’s and hosts of postings made by others.

Congress removed the “indecency” provisions in 2003, inasmuch as the Supreme Court had struck them down in 1997.

Here is a copy of the opinion for Reno v. ACLU at the Cornell University Law School site:

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The next important law is the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, or COPA

A good overall reference is at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

The main Govtrack reference is in Title XIV if HR 4328 of the 105th Congress, here.
There is no text in this reference. An earlier attempt had been HR3783, which had purported to amend the Communications Act of 1934. It got merged into 4328.

Here is a copy of the text at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The first Supreme Court ruling in 2002 ordered the Third Circuit to review the law on grounds other than the “community standards” argument. Here is the findlaw copy of the opinion, while maintaining an initial injunction ordered by Judge Lowell Reed of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in February, 1999. Here is the link.

The copy at Cornell is here.

An intermediate Third Circuit ruling on ACLU v. Ashcroft March 6, 2003 is here.

The second Supreme Court ruling on 2004 maintained the injunction but ordered a full trial on the merits of the case to determine whether technological developments could justify the idea that the “adult-id” requirements were the least restrictive means, as long as a review of the exact meaning of the law. Here is the link.

The district court trial was held in the fall of 2006 in Philadelphia. Judge Reed’s struck down the law and here is the opinion at the ACLU site.

Here is the main ACLU page on COPA.

The government appealed the latest decision and oral arguments before the Third Circuit will be made in the spring of 2008.

The Third Circuit upheld Judge Reed’s ruling on July 22, 2008. The case is now called ACLU v. Mukasey. Link to opinion.

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Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 (CIPA) requires libraries receiving funding to comply with certain filtering standards in protecting minors.

Text of act:

FCC link on compliance:

Supreme Court upholds law despite American Library Association Challenge.
Link:

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Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA)
FTC text

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Child Pornography Protection Act of 1998. Child Pornography images produced by animation without children is still illegal.

Text at Poltechbot:
At Cornell:

The Supreme Court struck this down in 2002. Wikisource version of opinion

The Wikipedia summary of the legal arguments is important, here.

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Coercion and Enticement (USC 2422), Cornell text of law.
Used in federal prosecutions of Internet chat room stings

Other major USC items include 2252A and 2256 (for child pornography) and 2252B (using misleading domain names, especially to entice minors to material that is “harmful to minors” by the COPA definition) and 2425 (transmitting information about a minor for illegal purposes). You can key in the code section into the URL above. Most of the USC statutes in this range deal with protection of minors.

2252A is called the PROTECT Act (Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today).

The Cornell link for 2252A is here.
The Supreme Court upheld a3b of this law in United States v. Williams on May 19, 2008, a so-called “pandering and solicitation” provision.

(7) Proposed

Deleting Online Predators Act of 2007
HR 1120, 110th Congress, introduced by Mark Kirk (R-LA)
Govtrack Requires that schools receiving federal funds block access to social networking sites (except in adult supervision) and HTM materials

(8) Proposed
Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005, similar to COPA but also requires pornographers to establish a trust fund.
H.R. 3479, 109th Congress, Govtrack.
Senate S1507, link.
Died in 109th Congress.

I have running news on COPA, Internet content labeling and minors protection on these two blogs: COPA (link here); Internet safety and cyber-bullying (link here)

The American Library Association has a useful link “CPPA, COPA, CIPA: Which Is Which?” here.

On March 1, 2007 Lamar Smith (R-TX) introduced to the United States House of Representatives the “Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act” as H.R. 837. There are ten cosponsors.

The Govtrack reference is here.

The Congressional Research Service Summary is here. The bill would further prohibit the transmission through telecommunications providers of child pornography and amend the Victims of Child Abuse Act of 1990 to require the reporting of child pornography.

Like S 1086 (discussed on this blog Jan 18), it would require operators of commercial websites to label web pages with sexually explicit materials. Unlabeled pages could not be presented directly to viewers or search engines. This poses the same difficulties as S 1086.

The link for the text is here.

(These postings largely present the facts about major bills in Congress, or other legal matters such as court opinions. Some of the blog subject titles do say “facts” but that is what all of the entries are intended to do.)

The Cyber Safety for Kids Act of 2007, S. 1086, was introduced on April 11, 2007 by Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), in the 110th Congress.

The basic govtrack reference is this.

The bill has been introduced and has not progressed far in the legislative process as of this time. There was a similar bill, S. 2426, in the 109th Congress and is now dead since it is replaced by this one.

The text of the bill is here.

The concept of the bill is as follows. Any operator of a commercial website will be required, when providing content that is legally “harmful to minors”, to provide a home page or introductory page without such content, age verification screening, and a content descriptive tag or label as developed and approved by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The NTIA would have to develop this mechanism within 90 days of enacting the bill. A website owner would also be required to register certain descriptive information with ICANN.

The Congressional Research Service Summary also has an executive summary of the bill, here.

The bill would appear to replicate many of the provisions of the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA) which has been declared unconstitutional by a United States District Court in Philadelphia (as of March 22, 2007), a ruling which is under appeal to the Third Circuit by the United States Department of Justice.

However, it requires that web publishers conform to three provisions with “and” logic: provision of a harmless “introductory” page, provision of adult verification, and provision of content labels.

Many questions will come up. For example, search engines typically can index any page. Would the pages with HTM content have to be excluded from search engines by robot metatags and accessed only by “safe” links? Would an entire site have to be under adult verification, or only the specific page in question? How is this more acceptable than COPA?

There are already private entities that can provide content labels. One is the Family Online Safety Institute, which incorporates the Internet Content Rating Association.
Another is Safesurf. ISP’s like AOL have been working on content rating systems for households that have different accounts for different kids monitored by parents.

Please see also my discussion of COPA on blogger, link here, esp. Jan 18 (today).