Tuesday, April 20, 1999
Dirty e-mail doesn't pass muster with court
BY RICHARD CARELLI
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — A federal law aimed at limiting e-mail smut does not violate free-speech rights, the Supreme Court ruled Monday. That could be bad news for people who like to write dirty online and for the proprietors of annoy.com.
The court's unanimous decision, issued without an opinion, rejected a company's argument that one part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 threatens free-speech rights.
The law had been attacked by ApolloMedia Corp., a San Francisco firm that developed the annoy.com site to let people anonymously give their opinions to public officials in language some might consider indecent.
The challenged provision of the law makes it a crime to transmit a “communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten or harass another person.” The provision applies to all e-mail, even messages sent from one friend to another.
A three-judge federal court upheld the law after interpreting it to ban only obscene material that gets no constitutional protection. The Supreme Court affirmed that ruling.
Not all sexually explicit language and pictures are obscene. Free-speech protections are lost only if the material appeals to prurient interests and depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and that determination is left to a jury applying contemporary community standards.
William Bennett Turner, ApolloMedia's lawyer, said Monday's decision “makes you nervous ... to be liable” for some future e-mail content found by a court to have crossed the line between indecent and obscene.
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