ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 16, 1996 TAG: 9602160055
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Boston Globe
NOTE: Below
A federal court in Philadelphia said Thursday the government cannot enforce a new law forbidding the transmission of ``indecent'' material to minors over computer networks.
In issuing a temporary restraining order, U.S. District Judge Ronald Buckwalter blocked implementation of the Communications Decency Act, a controversial part of the new telecommunication law that took effect last week.
The American Civil Liberties Union and 19 other groups filed suit to block the law as soon as it was signed by President Clinton. Buckwalter said his injunction will remain in effect at least until he hears arguments in the pending lawsuit.
The bill would make it a crime punishable by $250,000 in fines and two years in prison to send ``indecent'' or ``obscene'' material that could be viewed by a minor over a computer network.
Buckwalter said the Communications Decency Act failed to define ``indecent'' sufficiently and may be too vague to be constitutional.
The Justice Department argued in a brief filed Wednesday that the act was clearly worded to apply only to ``patently offensive'' material and aimed only to keep it inaccessible to children. It said such provisions were constitutionally valid.
But Buckwalter said in his ruling, ``depending on who is making the judgment, indecent could include a whole range of conduct not encompassed by `patently offensive.'''
``It's a rather confusing ruling,'' said Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Steinhardt said he expected the decency law would ultimately be ruled unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, scholarly experts on the Internet criticized the government for relying on a controversial study of pornography on the Internet. In its legal brief, the Justice Department cited a study of sex on the Internet that appeared last year in the Georgetown Law Journal. The study was produced by Martin Rimm, an undergraduate engineering student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
The Rimm study, which was the subject of a cover article in Time magazine, has been widely criticized as inaccurate. Time magazine raised questions about its reliability in a later article.
Donna Hoffman, associate professor of management at Vanderbilt University, said she was surprised the government relied on Rimm's research. ``It's completely methodologically incompetent, and it draws conclusions that are not supported by the evidence,'' said Hoffman, who co-authored a detailed critique of the Rimm study. ``I'm stunned and shocked that the government does not know this.''
Northern Illinois University sociology Professor Jim Thomas said he was surprised by the government's reliance on the Rimm study because ``it's so intellectually flawed.'' Indeed, Thomas said he teaches a research methods course in which he uses Rimm's study as an example of how not to do research. Efforts to reach Martin Rimm were unsuccessful.
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