Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union
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In Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), the United States Supreme Court voted 9-0 to strike down two anti-obscenity provisions of the Communications Decency Act (the "CDA"), finding they violated the free speech provisions of the First Amendment. This was the first major Supreme Court ruling regarding the Internet.
The CDA was an attempt to protect minors from explicit material on the Internet by criminalizing the "knowing" transmission of "obscene or indecent" messages to any recipient under 18; and also the knowing sending to a person under 18 of anything "that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs."
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The government's defenses of the CDA
The government's main defense of the CDA was that similar decency laws had been upheld in three prior Supreme Court decisions: Ginsberg v. New York (1968); FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978); and Renton v. Playtime Theaters, Inc. (1986); and that the CDA should be similarly upheld.
In Ginsberg v. New York, the Supreme Court had upheld a New York statute that barred selling obscene material to minors under 17; in Reno v. ACLU, the government argued that the CDA was a similar statute applying instead to the Internet. The Court, however, noted that the CDA was much broader than the New York statute, which allowed parents to consent to purchases; applied only to commercial transactions; and as part of the definition of "obscene", said the material must be "utterly without redeeming social importance for minors". (The latter echoed a requirement in the decision overturning a U.S. government ban on the book Ulysses by James Joyce 80 years previous.)
In FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, the Supreme Court had upheld the possibility of the FCC delivering administrative sanctions to a radio station for broadcasting George Carlin's monologue entitled "Filthy Words". In Reno v. ACLU, though, the Supreme Court held that this was not case law justifying the CDA, as the FCC's sanctions were not criminal punishments; and TV and radio broadcasts, "as a matter of history, had 'received the most limited First Amendment protection' ... in large part because warnings could not adequately protect the listener from unexpected program content", as opposed to Internet users, who must take "a series of affirmative steps" to access explicit material.
Finally, in Renton v. Playtime Theaters, Inc., the Supreme Court had upheld a zoning ordinance that kept adult movie theaters out of residential neighborhoods. The government argued that the CDA was an attempt to institute "a sort of 'cyberzoning' on the Internet". In Reno v. ACLU, however, the Court ruled that the "time, place, and manner regulation" that Renton had enacted was not similar to the CDA, which was "a content-based blanket restriction on speech".
The decision
In a nuanced decision, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote of the differences between Internet communication and previous types of communication that the Court had ruled on. In conclusion, he wrote:
- We are persuaded that the CDA lacks the precision that the First Amendment requires when a statute regulates the content of speech. In order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another. That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve. (...)
- It is true that we have repeatedly recognized the governmental interest in protecting children from harmful materials. But that interest does not justify an unnecessarily broad suppression of speech addressed to adults. As we have explained, the Government may not "reduc[e] the adult population ... to ... only what is fit for children." (footnotes removed)
The rest of the CDA, including the "safe harbor" provision protecting ISPs from being liable for the words of others, was not affected by this decision and remains law.
Concurring decision
Justice O'Connor, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, agreed with the decision "as of 1997", but expressed interest in the idea of creating an "adult zone" on the Internet that was made inaccessible to minors through "gateway technology" that had been investigated by a lower district court. If such technology could be introduced, they wrote, zoning portions of the Internet to prohibit adult content could be as constitutional as such zoning is in the physical world.
The two dissented in part, writing they would have invalidated a narrower portion of the two CDA provisions under review.
External links
- decision at FindLaw (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&navby=case&vol=521&invol=844), with links to decisions citing this one
- decision at EPIC (http://www2.epic.org/cda/cda_decision.html)
- Netlitigation case summary and review (http://www.netlitigation.com/netlitigation/cases/reno.htm)