The U.S. Supreme Court did what any student of the law expected...

...and put a bullet through COPA (The "Child Online Protection Act"). Most significantly, they didn't even bother giving it a hearing, allowing a lower court's ruling against the law to stand.

The reason they did that was because they knew that if they actually heard the case, they'd be establishing more precedents reinforcing Free Speech. (OMG! Stop! Stop! Don't reinforce the already vast body of case law upholding the 1st Amendment!) So, while the ignominous defeat of COPA sounds like a victory - and it was - the forces of prudery and government control of our lives managed to limp from the battlefield. They'll be back, for sure.

Before anyone jumps on me for promoting filth, let me explain a bit about what COPA tries to do. It tries to "protect the children" by holding websites and content providers liable for preventing children from seeing "harmful content" and "explicit" materials. In drafting the law, the prudes in the Bush Department of Justice overreached by attempting to return to a 1950's-era definition of "harmful content" that included things like bare breasts and "prurient material" that violated the standards of the community. Those standards have failed repeatedly to hold up in the light of rationality (hello? some kids under the age of 18 breast feed?) and it's absolutely ridiculous to refer to "community standards" in the Internet age. What on earth are "community standards" on a planetary scale of culture? Certainly they aren't the parochial, redneck, bible-thumping prudery of John Ashcroft - a man so afraid of a naked female that he ordered coverings placed on the breasts of a statue of Lady Justice at the Department of Justice headquarters.

Sites like DA are the target of foolish legislation like COPA: the vocal minority of prudes want the world to change to suit them, rather than the other way around. "Take down anything that might offend me!" they shriek, rather than accepting that life does not guarantee anyone an offense-free experience and responding to protect themselves as they see fit. The lower courts that blocked COPA from ever being enforced wrote, in their decision, that blocking such materials is best done using filters and controls at the viewer's end of the pipe rather than at the upstream provider's. If you think about that for 2 seconds, you'll realize (as The Supreme Court did) that it's the only way that makes sense. If I don't like pictures of puppies, I can't ask the whole Internet to filter puppy pictures - but I can try to filter them on my own computer, or take the radical step of averting my eyes when I see one. It's simple: you can't make everyone happy, so you have to leave it up to each individual to do what makes sense for them.

But here's where the sad part comes in: sites like DA have bent over backwards to accomodate vocal prudes, in spite of the fact that laws like COPA have been consistently blocked before they've ever been enforced. That 18+ filter nonsense DA users and artists have to put up with? It was a cowardly attempt to bend over backwards to accomodate legislation that never meant anything. Or, at least, that's the excuse DA's founders, lawyers, and administrators give. The truth is more like that they don't have the courage to hold any kind of artistic ideals and prefer to knuckle under to whoever complains the loudest.

Those bare breasts that DA tries to filter as 18+? They don't have to do that. In the absence of COPA, the next law in line controlling "explicit materials" is drafted with fairly tight language defining "explicit" as penetration, oral sex, etc. You know - stuff that's actually explicit. Bare breasts or buttocks or ankles are part of artistic tradition and there is not a single case that I am aware of in which the Department of Justice or a district attorney has tried to go after a non-pay website devoted to art. They're completely aware that if they did, they'd lose, and they'd probably lose in a precedent-setting way that would set back their control freak fundamentalist agenda.

So - let's all wave "gbye!" to COPA. It won't be missed. One more empty excuse for restricting artists' ability to express themselves is gone. Of course, DA is a private site, and it's owners and administrators have the right to run it the way they want. Thus, we can expect it to continue to not live up the "deviant" part of its name, and we can expect religious prudery to continue to set the agenda.

I support


mjr.

PS - it seems a bit silly to dance on the grave of COPA when vastly more serious injustices are continuing. I'm tremendously happy to see that President Obama has ordered Guantanamo prison shut down within a year. The stain "gitmo" has inflicted on the honor of the United States will never fade. I doubt very much that the people responsible for it will ever be held accountable, because the decision was made at the highest levels, so we've given the world the right to point fingers and laugh whenever an american talks about "injustice." Ugh.