The day before the House Commerce Committee approved an Internet anti-smut bill, a federal court upheld a civil challenge to the bill's legislative parent, the Communications Decency Act.
"[The courts have said that] indecent speech cannot be made criminal on the Internet," declared Michael Traynor, who represented ApolloMedia, the publisher of Annoy.com. The site is specifically designed to flout a provision of the act that bars "indecent material with intent to annoy" from the Internet.
ApolloMedia said that the law amounted to censorship, and brought a lawsuit against Attorney General Janet Reno in January 1997 to challenge the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act.
On Wednesday, a three-judge federal panel handed down a divided ruling to ApolloMedia. The court found that the right to communicate indecent material with intent to annoy over the Internet is constitutionally protected.
But two of the judges stopped short of declaring the statute itself unconstitutional, so they did not technically rule in favor of ApolloMedia�s lawsuit against the government.
Any way you slice it, this is still a victory, said Electronic Frontier Foundation�s Stanton McCandlish.
"ApolloMedia wins either way. The outcome of this case helps narrow obscenity law, and neatly ties up the loose ends left over from the other lawsuits like ACLU v. Reno, that helped overturn the rest of the [Communications Decency Act]."
The ApolloMedia suit took on the only remaining section of the CDA left unchallenged by other suits.
Wednesday's court ruling found that while the term "obscene" had a reasonably clear legal definition offering little constitutional protection, the term "indecent" was more vague, and is protected by the First Amendment.
Annoy.com was created in January 1997 for the sole purpose of drawing attention to this disparity. The site is aflame with stinging attacks on conservative political targets, and flashing four-letter words. Readers are invited to send lewd hate email, complete with soft-porn images and ransom-note graphics.
"Whatever the outcome of this ruling, or whether we challenge it in the Supreme Court, we�ve still forced the government to apply meaning to vague words [affecting free speech]," said Annoy.com creator Clinton Fein.
"It�s been a lot of work, but the only regret that I have is this: The most indecent and annoying thing I have yet to see on the Internet is the Ken Starr report, and with this ruling, we�ve just saved his ass!"
