Legislation Again Tries to Protect Kids Online

Less than a month after a federal judge threw out a 1998 Internet child protection law that was designed to prevent minors from easily accessing sexually explicit material online, two senators have introduced a new bill with a similar goal.

The Cyber Safety for Kids Act of 2007 is being sponsored by Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and is designed to protect children from viewing pornographic images on the Internet by requiring the operators of adult sites to provide secure logs-in with age verification as well as home pages that are devoid of explicit material. It would also require adult Web site operators to include an electronic tag on their sites that make it easier for filtering software to block adult material.

If enacted, the law would give the U.S. Department of Commerce enforcement authority to issue civil penalties to adult-oriented Web sites that fail to follow the requirements of the law.

"I wish the solution to protecting kids on the Internet was as easy as shutting every one of these sites down, but it's not," Pryor said in a statement. "However, government can and should be a better partner to parents by providing basic protections. This legislation helps meet that goal and gives parents and teachers peace of mind."

The legislation will be sent to the Senate Commerce Committee before going to the full Senate for its consideration.

The proposed bill comes just a few weeks after U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania threw out the Child Online Protection Act, (COPA) of 1998 on the grounds that it was "impermissibly vague and overbroad." In issuing a permanent injunction against the law's enforcement, Reed said that -- despite the compelling interest by Congress in protecting children from sexually explicit material on the Web -- COPA violated a person's First and Fifth Amendment rights.

As with the bill proposed by Baucus and Pryor, COPA required adult Web site operators to take measures to prevent minors -- via age verification -- from accessing sexually explicit material online. COPA provided for criminal and civil penalties, including fines of up to US$50,000 and six-month jail-terms, for those who failed to comply with its requirements. The law was formally challenged by a number of entities, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and online publications such as Sexual Health Network, Salon Media Group Inc. and Free Speech Media LLC.

In throwing out COPA, Reed said that inherent ambiguities in it could be applied too broadly and would have allowed prosecutors to use COPA not only against pornographers but also against a wide variety of Web publishers.