Virginia age verification law for porn goes into effect July 1
washingtonian.com
washingtonian.com
This is the worst part of it. More and more states are going to turn to this kind of lawmaking and enforcement now that the supreme court set the precedent with the Texas abortion law.
Well crafted law.
All the same corrupt building-blocks could be used to punish people for having the wrong religion.
If politicians really cared about children they would have invested much more on education.
I, at least, am unwilling to surrender my hipaa private right of action or my securities fraud private rights of action or my ADA private rights of action. How about Epic's right of private action against Apple? Believe it or not, but there's a private right of action against monopolies.
No one is a vigilante because they sue a business over being handicap inaccessible.
1. The radical removal of standing requirements. Since when did laws like HIPAA or the ADA ever allow totally random people to sue a hospital "on your behalf", let alone be able to demand $10k from the target to keep it all for themselves!?
2. The farcical idea that regular checks-and-balances and judicial-review don't apply, simply because the legislature claims it delegated alllll enforcement to private individuals, despite still being responsible for, y'know, making the dang law.
It will require sites with adult content to require users to submit copies of government issued IDs in order to access pornographic content.
Sites that did not use proper verification measures can have lawsuits brought against them.
> B. Any commercial entity that knowingly or intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the Internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall, through the use of (i) a commercially available database that is regularly used by businesses or governmental entities for the purpose of age and identity verification or (ii) another commercially reasonable method of age and identity verification, verify that any person attempting to access such material harmful to minors is 18 years of age or older.
> C. Any commercial entity that violates the provisions of this section shall be subject to civil liability for damages resulting from a minor's access to such material harmful to a minor and reasonable attorney fees and costs.
If a social media site distributes "material harmful to a minor" to a minor (this says nothing about who uploads it - and uploading it is fine, as is displaying it to an adult in Virginia) they are open to being sued by a private citizen.
State law with a private citizen action (see also Texas SB 8) for civil liabilities is a different thing.
The way the law is crafted, it's not the state filing the lawsuits but rather private citizens and thus it complicates the ability for a company to sue the state (the normal way to invalidate a law).
This is one of the laws that is coming into action that is designed to challenge section 230 in the courts. This is an attempt to get the 1997 supreme court that struck down parts of section 230 that criminalized transmission of obscene or indecent material to minors to be re-examined and undone.
The fallout for this is social media companies that have porn as part of their service. It's easier for porn companies to comply with the law - but general social media companies that have "material considered harmful to minors" are squarely in the sights of the law and enables parents to sue those companies.
Porn companies can just do wholesale IP range blocking and geolocation and make serious effort to comply with the law and block all of their content.
Social media companies that contain content that is NSFW or NSFL will have much more of a challenge to comply with the law as they now also have to properly classify their content.
Ah yes, because children never steal IDs out of wallets.
lots of related discussion yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36528470