Live from the Nuke Free Zone

Way back in 1996, the US Government passed the Communications Decency Act to censor “indecent” speech on the Internet. This came as a shock to an Internet that since its inception had little content regulation of any kind other than early anti-spam techniques. The Electronic Frontier Foundation began the Blue Ribbon Campaign while many websites, including then-leading search engine Yahoo.com, made their backgrounds black for 48 hours. Then the ACLU sued and the law got thrown out of court and the Internet won that battle. Or so we thought…

As it turns out, only the CDA’s provisions against “indecent” material were struck down, while the provisions against “obscene” material were left standing. That means that Internet porn hosted in the United States is actually illegal and could be prosecuted and censored, as could conceivably be slash fanfic, the “flash mountain” website that was plugged on CNET several years ago, the fark.com squirrel, half of newgrounds.com, the erotica posts on boingboing.net, and of course the goatse.cx guy. The Internet would no longer be the same.

There was an attempt to remedy this in the case of Nitke v. Gonzales (nee Nitke v. Ashcroft) and finally stamp out the so far unused obscenity provision. Unfortunately, this lawsuit was rejected by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on the grounds of insufficient proof, and the Supreme Court has now unanimously affirmed the lower Court’s decision. This affirmation upholds the CDA’s ban on Internet obscenity, so the next time I cuss on this blog, Katster could be arrested and jailed for it.

More information on the Nitke case is available from a Justice Magazine article, Seth Finkelstein’s blog and Nitke website, and the blog of one of Nitke’s lawyers.