Supreme Court still considering virtual child porn law

The ACLJ represents 18 members of Congress in a friend-of-the-court brief which it has filed, urging the Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of the law. The Supreme Court was yesterday hearing oral arguments in a case against The Free Speech Coalition which involves a challenge of the CPPA, passed by Congress in 1996 and declared unconstitutional by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1999.

“The First Amendment was never intended to be used as a shield to protect pornographers,” said Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the ACLJ, which submitted its brief in support of the US Justice Department. “The Supreme Court has an important opportunity to uphold a law that protects children and punishes pornographers. The fact is that pornography is pornography - there should be no legal distinction between porn images that are either real or virtual. The Court has held that child pornography is not protected speech and we are hopeful the court will reach the same determination in this case. The Child Pornography Prevention Act is both necessary and constitutional.”

When Congress passed the CPPA, the law expanded a long-standing ban on child porn to prohibit any image that “appears to be” or “conveys the impression” of someone under the age of 18 engaged in sexually explicit conduct. The law targets computer technologies that can be used to alter an innocent picture of a child into a depiction of a child engaged in sex.

The ACLJ also filed a friend-of-the-court brief in another case involving a 1998 law - the Child Online Protection Act - a law that makes it a crime to knowingly place objectionable material where a child could find it on the internet. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in that case in November.

In the UK, the Protection of Children Act makes it an offence to distribute or share indecent photographs or pseudo photographs of children or have them in one’s possession with a view to doing this. Children include those under the age of 16 and those giving the impression that they are under 16. Data stored on a computer disk is also caught if it is capable of conversion into a photograph.