Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, unanimously ruling that anti-indecency provisions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act violated the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. This was the first major Supreme Court ruling on the regulation of materials distributed via the Internet.
The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was a law in the United States of America, passed in 1998 with the declared purpose of restricting access by minors to any material defined as harmful to such minors on the Internet. The law, however, never took effect, as three separate rounds of litigation led to a permanent injunction against the law in 2009.
Pornography has existed since the origins of the United States, and has become more readily accessible in the 21st century. Advanced by technological development, it has gone from a hard-to-find "back alley" item, beginning in 1969 with Blue Movie by Andy Warhol, the Golden Age of Porn (1969–1984) and home video, to being more available in the country and later, starting in the 1990s, readily accessible to nearly anyone with a computer or other device connected to the Internet. The U.S. has no current plans to block explicit content from children and adolescents, as many other countries have planned or proceeded to do.
United States v. X-Citement Video, Inc., 513 U.S. 64 (1994), was a federal criminal prosecution filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles against X-Citement Video and its owner, Rubin Gottesman, on three charges of trafficking in child pornography, specifically videos featuring the underaged Traci Lords. In 1989, a federal judge found Gottesman guilty and later sentenced him to one year in jail and a $100,000 fine.
An age verification system, also known as an age gate, is any technical system that externally verifies a person's age. These systems are used primarily to restrict access to content classified, either voluntarily or by local laws, as being inappropriate for users under a specific age, such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, video games with objectionable content, pornography, or to remain in compliance with online privacy laws that regulate the collection of personal information from minors, such as COPPA in the United States.
United States v. Extreme Associates, 431 F.3d 150, is a 2005 U.S. law case revolving around issues of obscenity. Extreme Associates, a pornography company owned by Rob Zicari and his wife Lizzy Borden, was prosecuted by the federal government for alleged distribution of obscenity across state lines. After several years of legal proceedings, the matter ended on March 11, 2009, with a plea agreement by Rob Zicari and Lizzy Borden.
Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, 535 U.S. 564 (2002), followed by 542 U.S. 656 (2004), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court, ruling that the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech.
Jerry Edwin Smith is an American attorney and jurist serving as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
United States v. American Library Association, 539 U.S. 194 (2003), was a decision in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the United States Congress has the authority to require public schools and libraries receiving E-Rate discounts to install web filtering software as a condition of receiving federal funding. In a plurality opinion, the Supreme Court ruled that public school and library usage of Internet filtering software does not violate their patrons' First Amendment free speech rights and that the Children's Internet Protection Act is not unconstitutional.
Legal frameworks around fictional pornography depicting minors vary depending on country and nature of the material involved. Laws against production, distribution and consumption of child pornography generally separate images into three categories: real, pseudo, and virtual. Pseudo-photographic child pornography is produced by digitally manipulating non-sexual images of real minors to make pornographic material. Virtual child pornography depicts purely fictional characters. "Fictional pornography depicting minors", as covered in this article, includes these latter two categories, whose legalities vary by jurisdiction, and often differ with each other and with the legality of real child pornography.
Much of the regulation in the adult film industry has been limited to preventing child pornography. To enforce the age of entry restriction, most adult industry production companies are required to have a Custodian of Records that documents and holds records of the ages of all performers.
In the United States, child pornography is illegal under federal law and in all states and is punishable by up to life imprisonment and fines of up to $250,000. U.S. laws regarding child pornography are virtually always enforced and amongst the harshest in the world. The Supreme Court of the United States has found child pornography to be outside the protections of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Federal sentencing guidelines on child pornography differentiate between production, distribution, and purchasing/receiving, and also include variations in severity based on the age of the child involved in the materials, with significant increases in penalties when the offense involves a prepubescent child or a child under the age of 18. U.S. law distinguishes between pornographic images of an actual minor, realistic images that are not of an actual minor, and non-realistic images such as drawings. The latter two categories are legally protected unless found to be obscene, whereas the first does not require a finding of obscenity.
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression v. Strickland, 560 F.3d 443, is a decision of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals involving a constitutional challenge—both facially and as-applied to internet communications—to an Ohio statute prohibiting the dissemination or display to juveniles of certain sexually-explicit materials or performances. The Sixth Circuit panel declined to resolve the constitutional issue but, instead, certified two questions to the Ohio Supreme Court regarding the interpretation of the statute. The Ohio Supreme Court answered both questions affirmatively and placed a narrowing construction on the statute. Since the Ohio Supreme Court's decision, the Sixth Circuit has not reheard the case.
Sable Communications of California v. Federal Communications Commission, 492 U.S. 115 (1989), was a United States Supreme Court case involving the definition of "indecent material" and whether it is protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court invalidated part of a federal law that prohibited "dial-a-porn" telephone messaging services by making it a crime to transmit commercial telephone messages that were either "obscene" or "indecent".
In the United States, some categories of speech are not protected by the First Amendment. According to the Supreme Court of the United States, the U.S. Constitution protects free speech while allowing limitations on certain categories of speech.
Fisher v. University of Texas, 570 U.S. 297 (2013), also known as Fisher I, is a United States Supreme Court case concerning the affirmative action admissions policy of the University of Texas at Austin. The Supreme Court voided the lower appellate court's ruling in favor of the university and remanded the case, holding that the lower court had not applied the standard of strict scrutiny, articulated in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), to its admissions program. The Court's ruling in Fisher took Grutter and Bakke as given and did not directly revisit the constitutionality of using race as a factor in college admissions.
United States obscenity law deals with the regulation or suppression of what is considered obscenity and therefore not protected speech or expression under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In the United States, discussion of obscenity typically relates to defining what pornography is obscene, as well as to issues of freedom of speech and of the press, otherwise protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Issues of obscenity arise at federal and state levels. State laws operate only within the jurisdiction of each state, and there are differences among such laws. Federal statutes ban obscenity and child pornography produced with real children. Federal law also bans broadcasting of "indecent" material during specified hours.
Connection Distributing Co. v. Holder, 557 F.3d 321 is a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that the record-keeping provisions of the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act did not violate the First Amendment.
Florence v. Shurtleff, Civil No. 2:05CV000485, was a case in which the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah issued an order stating that individuals could not be prosecuted for posting adult content that was constitutionally protected on general access websites, nor could they be civilly liable for failing to prevent access to adult content, so long as the material is identifiable by filtering software. The order was the result of a 2005 lawsuit, The King's English v. Shurtleff, brought by Utah bookstores, artists, Internet Service Providers and the other organizations challenging the constitutionality of certain portions of a Utah law intended to protect minors from adult content.
The Child Protection Restoration and Penalties Enhancement Act of 1990 , Title III of the Crime Control Act of 1990, Pub. L.Tooltip Public Law 101–647, 104 Stat. 4789, enacted November 29, 1990, S. 3266, is part of a United States Act of Congress which amended 18 U.S.C. § 2257 in respect to record-keeping requirements as set by the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988, also establishing prohibitions. The Act also amended 18 U.S.C. § 2243 and 18 U.S.C. § 2252 establishing and increasing penalties for sexual abuse of a minor. Also see Child Protective Services, for global practices and the approach of US.
