Louisiana’s district attorneys are dropping their bid to preserve a criminal law that requires online booksellers, publishers and other website owners to electronically verify customers’ ages before providing access to material that could be deemed harmful to children.
A court filing Monday says the district attorneys are no longer contesting the ACLU’s efforts to have the 2015 statute declared unconstitutional, The Associated Press reports.
The filing says they’re engaging in settlement talks to resolve the ACLU’s lawsuit and reach an agreement on legal fees and court costs.
U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson, of Baton Rouge, blocked enforcement of the law in April, saying its “vagueness” would cause a “chill on protected speech.”
“A possible consequence of the chill caused by (the law) is to drive protected speech from the marketplace of ideas on the Internet,” the judge wrote as he granted a preliminary injunction requested by ACLU attorneys.
District attorneys from the state’s 42 judicial districts opposed the ACLU’s lawsuit. The plaintiffs that challenged the law include Octavia Books in New Orleans and the publisher of Antigravity magazine.
Their lawsuit claimed the law would require booksellers to age-verify every Internet user “before providing access to non-obscene material that could be deemed harmful to any minor.”
“It would have made it almost impossible for us to maintain a website,” Octavia Books co-owner Tom Lowenburg says. “It’s hard to operate a business today without a website.”
Esha Bhandari, a New York City-based staff attorney for the ACLU, and a spokeswoman for Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry’s office declined to comment on Monday’s court filing. Landry’s office represents the district attorneys.
Website owners faced fines of up to $10,000 for not complying with the law. Its age-verification requirement didn’t apply to Internet service providers or “any bona fide news or public interest broadcast, website, video, report, or event.”
