You may remember Congress' first attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet, the Communications Decency Act. It prohibited anyone from transmitting or displaying "indecent" or "patently offensive" material to minors over the Internet. When the Supreme Court invalidated the statute in 1996, it was front-page news. The court ruled that the statute's language "lacked the precision that the First Amendment requires" and would therefore have a "chilling effect" on communication between adults, who have a constitutional right to engage in "indecent" and "offensive" communication with one another. In the court's memorable metaphor, the act "burned down the house to roast the pig." Congress went back to work and passed the Child Online Pornography Act-"son of CDA"-in 1998. This bill covers material that's "harmful to minors" and makes it unlawful to use the Internet to transmit or display such material to minors. This time, Congress added a definition: Borrowing from the Supreme Court's definition of obscenity, the act declares that material is harmful to minors if "the average person, applying contemporary community standards," would find that it "appeals to the prurient interest of minors" and lacks "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."
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