IN AN expression of US global might, a court in Philadelphia issued a ruling yesterday whose legal consequences will be felt all around the world. Three federal judges blocked enforcement of a law signed by President Clinton in February which banned "indecency" on the Internet.
The Communications Decency Act made it a crime, punishable by up to two years in jail, to transmit sexually offensive material which might be accessible to children. But the judges declared that the act violated First Amendment guarantees on free speech and was, therefore, "constitutionally intolerable".
US law effectively becomes international law in this case because 60 per cent of the material disseminated on the worldwide computer network originates in the United States. It is estimated that 35 million people in 160 countries are linked up to the Internet.
The ruling came in response to an appeal by a coalition combining online service providers - such as Microsoft and America Online - and US pressure groups.
The principal objection to the Act was that it failed adequately to define the meaning of the word "indecent". It would thus open the door to mischievous legal interpretation. It was also claimed that it sought to impose the same narrow restrictions on the Internet as existing laws do on US broadcast media. The Act's opponents argued that the Internet should be granted the wider legal latitude afforded to material that appears in print.
They also made the point that laws are already in the statute books imposing limits on obscenity, especially as regards child pornography, to which users of the Internet were as liable as anybody else.
The American Libraries Association argued that, because of the vagueness in the Act as to what constitutes indecency, adults using the Internet would be limited to reading books deemed suitable only for young children.
The possibility existed that medical writings on breast cancer and AIDS would be deemed indecent, as well as literary works such as Lady Chatterley's Lover and Joyce's Ulysses. The Society of Newspaper Editors feared difficulties when transmitting their publications on the Internet.
The judges were unanimous that the framers of the US constitution would have agreed that the Communications Decency Act went too far. "Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos", the judges ruled, "so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects. . . As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion."
However, backed by organisations on the religious right which support the Act, the US government said plans were in hand to appeal the Philadelphia ruling in the Supreme Court.