No-Smut E-Mail Law Upheld

A federal law aimed at keeping some smut out of e-mails does not violate anyone's free-speech rights, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The decision, issued without an opinion, rejected a computer technology company's argument that one part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 threatens its free-speech rights.

At issue was a provision in the law making it a crime to transmit a "communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent with intent to annoy, abuse, threat or harass another person."

That provision was attacked by ApolloMedia Corp., a San Francisco-based firm that developed the "annoy.com" Web site to let people anonymously communicate their opinions to public officials by using language some might consider indecent.

While the company's 1997 lawsuit was pending, the Supreme Court invalidated another provision of the Communications Decency Act. The justices in 1997 struck down Congress' effort to protect children from sexually explicit - but not legally obscene - material.

The invalidated provision had made it a crime to send any "obscene or indecent" material on the Internet knowing that it could be seen by someone under 18.

In ApolloMedia's case, a three-judge federal court in California upheld the challenged provision by interpreting it to apply only to obscene material, which gets no protection from the Constitution's First Amendment.

When that court announced its decision last September, ApolloMedia President Clinton Fein told The Associated Press he was pleased that "it is constitutionally protected to send indecent communications with an intent to annoy."

But his lawyer, William Bennett Turner, worried aloud that the judges failed to make clear "you can't outlaw indecent speech online."

ApolloMedia's Supreme Court appeal was filed in December. The 1996 law requires that challenges to any of its provisions be heard by three-judge trial courts and that appeals be taken directly to the Supreme Court.

"At stake ... is the right of ... all Internet users not to have to live under the uncertain cloud of a statute that on its face makes an indecent communication a felony," the appeal said.

But Clinton administration lawyers urged the justices to reject the appeal. "Whatever fear of prosecution (ApolloMedia) might have had at the outset of the case became entirely remote, speculative and conjectural after the district court's ruling," they said.

Monday's Supreme Court decision upheld, without explanation, the appeals court's ruling.

The case is ApolloMedia Corp. vs. Reno, 98-933.

Written by Richard Carelli