Tikkabik

Fortunately, Pennsylvania state law 7330 is still in force.

By the way, these were the same 3 nuttier-than-a-fruitcake judges who last year removed a woman attorney's children from her custody because "she wasn't spending enough time with them".

That Solomon-like decision, by the way, was reversed.

The scope of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA, for the benefit of the uninitated) and the scope of PA 7330 is very different.

Given Wired's fucking retarded headline: "Court Nixes Child Net Porn Law," I'm not surprised you're confused.

COPA dealt ostensibly with protecting kids from seeing pornography on the Web, which PA 7330 dealt specifically with the distribution of child pornography itself.

I haven't a problem with restricting or eliminating child porno -- it's sick, demented stuff -- but even within that context, PA 7330 is a rather provincial piece of legislation. It basically says that ISPs operating within the state of Pennsylvania have to make it impossible for PA residents to view child porn at all.

This isn't an easy situation to deal with, because the Internet itself is a global network, and obviously Pennsylvania's jurisdictional arm doesn't reach to, say, Thailand. My concern here is that PA 7330 will eventually lead to some sort of balkanization of Web site content that some people in some places can see and that others in other spots can't -- especially if national ISPs take the easy way out and block such content nationwide, rather than stopping at just filtering content for one state's subscribers.

The problem that I had with COPA, and apparently the problem that the court agreed about, is that it's frustratingly vague.

In both cases, it's one of those sad cases of legislation being enacted to do what should be common sense. Alas, there's frighteningly little of that in the world.