A US federal court Friday threw out a Pennsylvania law requiring Internet service providers to block access to online pornography, calling the law unconstitutional, the Associated Press reports. “No one challenged the state’s right to stop child porn, which is already illegal under federal law,” but civil liberties organizations such as the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had challenged the law because they said that for two years after it was passed, ISPs “trying to obey blocking orders were forced to cut access to at least 1.5 million legal Web sites that had nothing to do with child pornography or even legal pornography, but shared Internet addresses with the offending sites.” The law also made ISPs liable for content being served from a computer in another country and violated interstate commerce rules established by the Constitution, the court found, according to the New York Times’s coverage. “Judge Jan E. Dubois was ultimately persuaded that given the current state of technology ‘the Act cannot be implemented without excessive blocking of innocent speech in violation of the First Amendment’.” The Pennsylvania law was the only one of its kind in the US, and a lot of state governments were interested in its fate. As of this writing, the state attorney general’s office had not said if it would appeal the decision.
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