The Hindu Business Line : Go offline to recover from online damage

THE recent Baazee episode raises questions on what can and can't be sold, on who is responsible to decide that, and if law has the right safeguards. If you're sufficiently worked up that kids can be exposed to vile stuff on the Net, you'd do well to read about how the US wished to tackle the problem.

They have the COPPA or the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which limits the ability of sites to offer services to those aged 12 years and under without explicit parental consent. It is a different matter that age declarations on the screen are not foolproof.

Another similar sounding Act, called the COPA, or the Child Online Protection Act, is about six years old, and was aimed at protecting children from harmful sexual material on the Internet.

It defined minor as those below 17 years of age and "material that is harmful to minors" was defined as "any communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other matter of any kind that is obscene or that the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest; depicts, describes, or represents, in a manner patently offensive with respect to minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, an actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual act, or a lewd exhibition of the genitals or post-pubescent female breast; and taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."

The law, thus, covered all hardcore and softcore pornography.

But the law has faced many roadblocks, and is yet to take effect. For instance, an injunction was obtained in 1998 against enforcing COPA. In 1999, a Circuit Court struck down the law, saying that it was too broad in using `community standards' criterion to define harmful materials.

More recently, in June 2004, the block on enforcement got reinforced by a US Supreme Court in the Ashcroft vs American Civil Liberties Union case.

COPA presumes that parents lack the ability, not the will, to monitor what their children see, observed the court. Instead, it suggested the use of filtering software. "Filters may well be more effective than COPA," the court said. "They can be applied to all forms of Internet communication, including e-mail, not just communications available via the World Wide Web."

One judge said: "As a parent, grandparent, and great-grandparent, I endorse that goal without reservation. As a judge, however, I must confess to a growing sense of unease when the interest in protecting children from prurient materials is invoked as a justification for using criminal regulation of speech as a substitute for, or a simple backup to, adult oversight of children's viewing habits."

Another judge pointed out that there can be material on the Net that may not be of "prurient interest": such as "an essay about a young man's experience with masturbation and sexual shame; a serious discussion about birth control practices, homosexuality, consequences of prison rape; an account by a 15-year-old, written for therapeutic purposes, of being raped when she was 13; a guide to self-examination for testicular cancer; a graphic illustration of how to use a condom; ... let alone Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ken Starr's report on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal." Thus, as the final paragraph in that judgment noted, "the obscene and the nonobscene do not come tied neatly into separate, easily distinguishable, packages."

Nor do adults get wisdom in neat packages as to how kids can be guided. Which is why I guess you can achieve a better average by spending quality offline time with your wards, to offset any online damage.

E&OE@TheHindu.co.in

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