Censorship and the Communications Decency Act
Censorship and the Communications Decency ActCensorship: suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive". Offensive: giving painful or unpleasant situations.These two words can easily be looked up and defined when having to use them in a paper, but trying to describe what should be censored and what is offensive is a daunting task. There have always been huge debates over censorship that aims at the First amendment and whether it is constitutional for a group of people to decide what is right for the people. Even before World War I, there were attacks on what was considered offensive material. "Anthony Comstock, head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, passed the first censorship law in 1873. The law forbade the mailing of anything, in his opinion, lewd, obscene or indecent." (Zelezny, 453) The controversy over censorship raged feverishly after WWI and until the Tariff Act of 1930, many literary classics were not allowed into the United States because of the obscenity contained in them. Over a 15-year period, which began in 1957, the Supreme Court made relaxed restrictions on "obscene" material. Supreme Court decisions struck down many obscenity statues, states responded by enacting laws prohibiting
Some people believe this to actually mean that something can be labeled indecent if it offends a majority of FCC Commissioners. After the Communications Decency Act was declared unconstitutional in Reno v. The House of Representatives passed its own version of the CDA called the Internet Family Empowerment Amendment that was less restrictive the Senate's CDA. On June 12, 1996, a three-judge court in Philadelphia ruled in favor of ACLU stating that the CDA was an unconstitutional abridgment of rights protected by the First and Fifth Amendments. "Thus was the attempt to ban from the Internet any sexual expression that was patently offensive or indecent, though not necessarily obscene, unless that offensive expression could be effectively shielded from minors" (Zelezny, 506). In 1998, it passed the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) that stated:"Whoever knowingly and with knowledge of the character of the material, in interstate or forgein commerce by means of the World Wide Web, makes any communication for commercial purposes that is availbalbe to any minor and that includes any material that is harmful to minors shall be fined not more than $50, 000, improsoned not more than 6 months or both" (Zelezny, 507. This idea was developed in 1994, by Senator James Exon of Nebraska, who was trying to begin a campaign to regulate online communication, after appearing as a guest on NBC's Dateline program related to online pedophiles. The government hoped that the CDA would give law enforcement officials new tools to prosecute those who would use a computer to make the equivalent of obscene telephone calls. In December 1995, a compromise was met between the House and Senate and on February 1, 1996 and was named the Telecommunication Reform Act of 1996. )The Miller test and the COPA had similar definitions of obscenity, but with a broader sense. "In 1997, the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom and artist Barbara Nitke filed a lawsuit challenging the remaining provisions of the CDA, much of what was struck down by the U. The plaintiffs argued that this new law was too broad and would question the ability of the Internet to be a mode of free "expression, education, and commerce for adults. abridging freedom of speech, or of the press.
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