The Chicago Typewriter was a model of 
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Court rules that government may not censor the internet. Government immediately begins censoring court.
By Mark | March 23, 2007
A federal district court in Philadelphia ruled yesterday that the government may not censor the free exchange of information between adults.
The case, ACLU v. Gonzales, concerned a challenge to the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which was designed to keep minors shielded from commercial communication that is “harmful to minors” unless a technology-based attempt to verify the user’s age had been made. It was followup legislation to the earlier Communications Decency Act (CDA), which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional.
According to the Center for Democracy and Technology,
The court’s decision to permanently enjoin COPA is based on legal arguments that CDT has been making for over ten years: (1) that laws like the CDA and COPA will not be effective at protecting kids, (2) that those laws will burden and chill valuable, fully lawful online content aimed at adults (ranging from safe sex information to museum and art gallery web sites), and (3) that filtering technology, while not perfect, is far more effective than COPA and does not violate the First Amendment. The court’s decision is a ringing reaffirmation of the critical free speech principles declared by the U.S. Supreme Court in the CDA case.
The ACLU represented, among a host of other plaintiffs, Salon.com. According to the ACLU’s press release,
Joan Walsh, editor in chief of Salon.com who was a plaintiff in the case, said that parents, not the government, should control children’s access to information and ideas. “Whether minors should read Salon is a question for their parents, not the government.”
Protecting children from adult material is all well and good, but placing the legal burden solely on the content providers was definitely the wrong way to go about it.
UPDATE: I removed the cartoon from the original post, as I just noticed that the cartoonist, Steve Greenberg, has explicitly stated on his website that his cartoons are not public domain. My apologizes to Mr. Greenberg. If you would like to see the cartoon, you can see it on his site here. I replaced the image with a nice public domain image of page one of the U.S. Constitution.
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