Web Porn for Everyone!

The execrable 1998 Child Online Protection Act, never enforced and long at issue in federal court, has been struck down. The law would have criminalized sites that allow kids to access material "harmful to minors." By what standards, you ask? Why, by "contemporary community standards." As Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed writes in his opinion:

"Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection."

Elsewhere in Reason: Here's my take from November, and here is Jacob Sullum from way back in 2001.