Aug 21, 2008

Mass Media | The Internet Has Made Government Action Against Child Pornography Untenable

In 1973 the Supreme Court established guidelines for obscenity laws that provided for the banning or regulation of materials if they were deemed patently offensive “by contemporary community standards.” The proliferation of Internet pornography has raised questions about how the community standards test can be applied to online pornography. The following viewpoint by Jeffrey Rosen was written in response to a 2002 Supreme Court ruling on the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, a federal law that attempted to protect children from Internet pornography. Rosen argues that the Supreme...