Appeals Court Hears Arguments
in Virginia Cyberporn Law
A three-judge panel of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments October 28 in Virginia’s appeal of last year’s court ruling that overturned a 1999 law criminalizing the “knowing display” of any material online that is deemed harmful to minors. “All we ask with this law is that commercial pornographers take reasonable measures to shield children from these materials,” State Solicitor General William Hurd asserted, suggesting that requiring a credit-card number as proof of age would be “the electronic equivalent of putting the pornographic magazine behind the counter.”
Plaintiff attorney Thomas W. Kirby responded that businesses whose clients rely on maintaining their privacy, such as a sex-counseling clinic for people with disabilities, would lose customers if credit cards were required to access sexually explicit information.
Asking what options the state had to shield children from objectionable material, Judge Paul V. Niemeyer said in an October 30 Associated Press report, “Have we abandoned our ability to do that just because we have an Internet? We have a need for segregating information so adults can see it and children can’t.”
The American Library Association’s Freedom to Read Foundation is one of 16 plaintiffs in the case.
Posted November 4, 2002.
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