Utah- Civil liberties, publishing and other groups filed a federal challenge Thursday to a Utah law that requires Internet service providers to give customers software filters for blocking pornographic Web sites.
Their lawsuit claims that many Web sites deemed harmful to minors share the same computer servers and Internet addresses as unrelated sites that contain no pornography, and blocking one site can block them all.
Lawyers say Utah’s statute is worse than some laws already struck down in other states because it provides no way for Web sites to appeal judgments made by Utah’s attorney general office about what constitutes a pornographic site.
Under the law signed by Gov. Jon Huntsman in March, state lawyers planned to begin trolling the Internet July 1 for ever-changing Web sites considered pornographic and issuing ISPs blacklists they must incorporate in software filters for customers.
Betsy Burton, owner of The King’s English Bookshop and one of the 14 plaintiffs, said such a list could include her Web site because it links to descriptions and jacket art for books like Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake,” whose cover depicts female bodies in the nude.
Also joining the lawsuit were another bookstore; Utah chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Sexual Health Network; the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and two small ISPs operating in Utah, Mountain Wireless and CSolutions Inc.
Federal courts have struck down Internet porn-blocking laws in Arizona, New Mexico, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin, said Michael Bamberger, a New York lawyer representing some of the plaintiffs. Congressional efforts also have been overturned.
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff’s office had no immediate response to the 55-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City.
“We have just received it. We’re going to review it and will be meeting with the people who filed the lawsuit,” Shurtleff spokesman Paul Murphy said Thursday.
The law’s chief sponsors in the Legislature did not return calls for comment.
Pete Ashdown of XMission, an Internet Service provider with more than 25,000 Utah subscribers, said he had lobbied against the law but didn’t join the lawsuit because “I didn’t want to antagonize anyone further.”
Ashdown, a Democrat who plans to challenge U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, next year, said parents can already buy filters to keep their children from viewing porn sites. XMission provides one on request and can reconfigure it to let through sites blocked by mistake. The Utah law would give XMission no such flexibility, he said.