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U.S. judge blocks 1998 online porn law
Legal Career News | 2007/03/22 16:02

A federal judge on Thursday dealt another blow to government efforts to control Internet pornography, striking down a 1998 U.S. law that makes it a crime for commercial Web site operators to let children access "harmful" material.

In the ruling, the judge said parents can protect their children through software filters and other less restrictive means that do not limit the rights of others to free speech.

"Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection," wrote Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr., who presided over a four-week trial last fall.


The law would have criminalized Web sites that allow children to access material deemed "harmful to minors" by "contemporary community standards." The sites would have been expected to require a credit card number or other proof of age. Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

Sexual health sites, the online magazine Salon.com and other Web sites backed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law. They argued that the Child Online Protection Act was unconstitutionally vague and would have had a chilling effect on speech.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a temporary injunction in 2004 on grounds the law was likely to be struck down and was perhaps outdated.

Technology experts said parents now have more serious concerns than Web sites with pornography. For instance, the threat of online predators has caused worries among parents whose children use social-networking sites such as News Corp.'s MySpace.

The case sparked a legal firestorm last year when Google challenged a Justice Department subpoena seeking information on what people search for online. Government lawyers had asked Google to turn over 1 million random Web addresses and a week's worth of Google search queries.

A judge sharply limited the scope of the subpoena, which Google had fought on trade secret, not privacy, grounds.

To defend the nine-year-old Child Online Protection Act, government lawyers attacked software filters as burdensome and less effective, even though they have previously defended their use in public schools and libraries.

"It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government's addressing the problem at its source," a government attorney, Peter D. Keisler, argued in a post-trial brief.

Critics of the law argued that filters work best because they let parents set limits based on their own values and their child's age.

The law addressed material accessed by children under 17, but applied only to content hosted in the United States.

The Web sites that challenged the law said fear of prosecution might lead them to shut down or move their operations offshore, beyond the reach of the U.S. law. They also said the Justice Department could do more to enforce obscenity laws already on the books.

The 1998 law followed Congress' unsuccessful 1996 effort to ban online pornography. The Supreme Court in 1997 deemed key portions of that law unconstitutional because it was too vague and trampled on adults' rights.

The newer law narrowed the restrictions to commercial Web sites and defined indecency more specifically.

In 2000, Congress passed a law requiring schools and libraries to use software filters if they receive certain federal funds. The high court upheld that law in 2003.



Hillary Clinton's net avenger unmasked
Law & Politics | 2007/03/22 13:04

The secret creator of a controversial web video portraying Democratic presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton as an Orwellian Big Brother has been outed. He is an employee of an internet consulting firm that works for one of Ms Clinton's opponents, Senator Barack Obama. The Obama campaign denied any involvement in the ad and the consulting firm said it had fired the worker.

The ad's reach -- it has received more than 1.7 million hits on YouTube in just a few days -- and the unmasking of its maker offer a glimpse of the changed media landscape of a nascent presidential campaign that is bitterly competitive 10 months before first voting.

The new popularity of web video allows broad distribution of clever political messages, which are often negative attack ads that may not readily be traced to their creators.

Phillip de Vellis, a strategist with the Washington-based consulting firm Blue State Digital, which hosts the Obama campaign web site, said he made the ad.

"I did it. And I'm proud of it," Mr de Vellis said in a response posted on a website site this week.

Mr de Vellis said he had acted on his own, without the knowledge of the Obama campaign or his employer.



US court rules Pringle chips are not satanic
Court Feed News | 2007/03/22 11:58

Pringles appear to be safe from demonic association after a US court ruled that the devil is not in league with global consumer brand Procter & Gamble (P&G). The ruling brought an end to a 12-year lawsuit purused by P&G against four distributors of rival Amway, over rumours tying P&G to Satanism

P&G won the $19M lawsuit when the court concluded that the four had spread a false accusation that P&G subsidised Satanic cults.

The rumour had proved popular with evangelicals in the US. During the 1960s, a story began circulating that the corporation was controlled by Satan worshipers. A moon-star symbol was used by the company on many of its products from 1882 to 1985, which was considered suspect.

The stars in fact stand for the thirteen original American colonies. But the arrangement of stars in the symbol was said to secretly spell out the Revelation 13:18 "number of the beast": 666.

Without examining the facts, many people, most notably evangelicals, signed petitions against Procter & Gamble and boycotted their products in the 1980s and 1990s.

This latest case is one of several unfair competition suits P&G has brought refuting the Satanism slurs.

According to P&G, the four distributors had passed on to customers the notion that its logo - featuring a bearded man looking over a field of 13 stars - was a symbol of Satan.

"This is about protecting our reputation," said Jim Johnson, P&G's chief legal officer.

Amway pointed out that it had successfully defended itself in an earlier case brought by P&G that had been connected with the rumours.

It had also, it said, done everything it could to get the rumour stamped out.



Federal judges slow to report travel expenses as required
Headline News | 2007/03/22 10:03

The Community Rights Counsel (CRC) said Wednesday that the new Judicial Conference Policy on Judges' Attendance at Privately Funded Educational Programs has not yet produced any public disclosures of travel expenses on judicial websites. According to the Judicial Conference:

The Judicial Conference adopted a private seminars disclosure reporting policy that requires educational program providers and judges to disclose certain information relevant to judges' attendance at privately-funded educational programs.

The disclosure policy takes effect on January 1, 2007. This means that any organization covered by the policy that issues an invitation on or after January 1, 2007 (for a program commencing after that date), to a federal judge to attend an educational program as a speaker, panelist, or attendee and offers to pay for or reimburse that judge, in excess of $305, must disclose financial and programmatic information.

The policy requires disclosure within 30 days, but CRC, a judicial ethics watchdog group, conducted a review and found that "80 days after the January 1, 2007 effective date of the new policy, not a single junket has been reported." The CRC criticized the Administrative Office for the US Courts for "applying the policy in a way that seems designed to delay the reporting of information as long as possible" by determining that the policy only applies to invitations issued on or after January 1, 2007.

The Judicial Conference of the United States is the policy-making body of the federal court system and is led by Chief Justice John Roberts. A court spokesperson said Wednesday that effective implementation of the new system could take some time.



Supreme Court blocks Ohio execution
Court Feed News | 2007/03/22 02:17

The execution of a man who killed a woman and scattered her remains across two states was blocked Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Inmate Kenneth Biros had waited for the decision hours past his 10 a.m. scheduled execution time at Ohio's death house.

Prisons director Terry Collins said the execution would not happen Tuesday.

The execution team had been waiting in a holding pattern while the court decided, ready to administer the lethal injection if the court had granted to the state's request to go ahead with the execution.

The justices' one-sentence decision agreed with two lower courts that had ruled to delay the execution, including the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that refused earlier Tuesday to allow a hearing before the full court to consider a state appeal.



Law firm will not oppose Kraft spin off
Headline News | 2007/03/21 22:07

A law firm that is suing the tobacco industry over the marketing of "light" cigarettes said Wednesday it will not oppose plans by Philip Morris USA''s parent company, Altria Group Inc., to spin off its Kraft Foods business.

The law firm Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld and Toll has filed a class action suit against several tobacco companies in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, alleging they deceived smokers about the safety of their "light" cigarettes.

Attorney Michael Hausfeld previously said he would consider filing an injunction to stop Altria from divesting Kraft if it would leave the company unable to pay the $200 billion in damages he is seeking for his clients.

Hausfeld''s firm said Wednesday that the spinoff could actually strengthen Altria financially, and thus "may prove in the best interests of our clients."
New York City-based Altria Group Inc. plans to spin off packaged food maker Kraft next week. Altria currently owns 88.9 percent of Kraft''s outstanding shares.



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