US judge strikes down anti-Internet porn law

NEW YORK: A US federal court ruled on Thursday that a 1998 law designed to block children from viewing Internet pornography violates the US Constitution's free speech protections.   

The ruling sided with a challenge brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had argued that the provisions of the Child Online Protection Act were too restrictive.   

Judge Lowell Reed of the US District Court in Philadelphia wrote in his ruling that while he sympathized with the goal of restricting minors from seeing pornography, other means that were less restrictive of free speech, such as commercial software filters, were available to block pornographic content.   

The Child Online Protection Act made it a crime for any person to provide minors access to "harmful material" over the Internet. Violators could be fined up to $50,000 and imprisoned for up to 6 months.