The True Death of Second Life: COPA Penalties Due to Age Verification Removeal

Head's up Lindens. You're about to be in for a rough year.

Cheers.

http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/briefs/03-218/03-218.mer.pet.html

How thoughtful of you to summarize that long and technical document. I'm sure your efforts will provoke an informed and reasoned discussion.

Bravo.

any one care to let a lay person know what the findings of the court are in that brief.

i could not figure it out lol

Is this a thread about the Copa Cabana?

I can't believe someone thought removing age verficaiton would be a good idea. Have they been living under a rock?

Key Line -

"COPA authorizes the imposition of criminal and civil penalties on any person who "knowingly and with knowledge of the character of the material, in interstate or foreign commerce by means of the World Wide Web, makes any communication for commercial purposes that is available to any minor and that includes any material that is harmful to minors." 47 U.S.C. 231(a)(1). A person communicates "for commercial purposes" only if he "is engaged in the business of making such communications," 47 U.S.C. 231(2)(A), and a person is engaged in the business of making such communications only if he "devotes time, attention, or labor" to making harmful-to-minors communications "as a regular course of [his] trade or business, with the objective of earning a profit as a result of such activities." 47 U.S.C. 231(2)(B).

"

Last I heard, the case ASHCROFT, ATTORNEY GENERAL v. AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION et al. (to be technical, it upheld a lower court ruling, but still) ruled that COPA is unconstitutional and can not be enforced. End of discussion.

COPPA, on the other hand, is still in force. However, the main portion of COPPA restricts the request for personal information of someone younger than 13.

I love message forum lawyers. Never does an MMO forum fail to produce at least a few junior Perry Masons.

What it could mean is that, as long as SL doesn't have age verification, any user might be a minor. Thus, if anyone (such as an escort) emotes or speaks sexually explicitly for a profit on SL, they've committed a crime. It does not matter whether the person actually was a minor or not.

The problem is this bit: "makes any communication for commercial purposes that is available to any minor and that includes any material that is harmful to minors." The question is, does that mean that now, everything on SL is "available to minors", or is a given communication only "available" to those within chat radius at the time? The latter seems technically right, but seems the sort of thing a court wouldn't consider (otherwise someone could say "I know I put the nudie magazines on the bottom shelf, your honour, but there are no children in line of sight, so it wasn't available to any"

If this is indeed the key material then LL is totally safe from a legal point of view. this doesn't say what the OP thinks it does.


Having no-age verification is a bad idea, but it doesn't seem to be made illegal by this act.

And here I was hoping my Kendra avatar would end up sitting at a table on Dateline.

We all know that will happen someday.

You'd have to lose the funny hat first, Kendra.

we must save teh chilluns from teh evilz of teh intraweb

Hey, Einsman, did you read the article you linked to?

Last time I checked, that's what Second Life is.

So... all this over a law that can't be enforced?

The linked material isn't even a SCOTUS decision. It's a legal brief submitted to the SCOTUS.

Until I can load SL in IE by typing http://www.secondlife_thegame.com/Seacliff and go to my home, without loading a third party program, its a chatroom, not part of the "web".

Yanno, your AV is actually cute ol' bird. She looks like fun. Your forum AV on the other hand always provokes me to violence.

-Kiamat Dusk

A few things to consider:

(1) Yes, removing age veritification is bad move, IMHO.

(2) COPA specifically says, "THE WORLD WIDE WEB." It doesn't say "THE INTERNET". It had to be changed to meet the "narrowly tailored" requirement to make it constitutionally viable. Therefore, it in no way affects Second Life, and Second Life doesn't run on the World Wide Web.

(3) Do cartoonish representations of human characters represent harmful materials? The spirit of the law is clearly an idiot Republican reaction to porn on the web. Do you really think anyone will car about cartoonish images being intimate while Google Images allows you to see just about anything the human body is capable of doing?

Fortunately, we do have some RL attorneys in the house; Jake, Katykiwi? Help us?

Regards,

-Flip

I agree with your point number 1, but I really don't know how you could say number 3. I don't think you have thought about what you are saying there.

coco

LL will have no problems if they reinstate some form of age verification. They need to simply because there is a mature section ... and red triple-X's all around.

Hentai is rated X.