Two New Orleans bookshops are challenging a new Louisiana law that requires websites publishing material deemed harmful to minors to verify the age of their users, saying it would make them appear incorrectly to be “adult” bookstores.
Passed earlier this summer, the law says that failure to “electronically acknowledge and attest that the person seeking to access the [harmful to minors] material is 18 years of age or older” will “constitute the unlawful distribution of material harmful to minors through the internet”, risking a fine of up to $10,000 (£6,500).
In a federal lawsuit filed this week [PDF], bookshops Octavia B ooks and the Garden District Book Shop, together with Future Crawfish Paper LLC, the publisher of Antigravity magazine, the American Booksellers Association and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, say the new requirement violates the First Amendment rights of booksellers and publishers.
None of the books offered by the bookshops are “obscene”, they write, but “some might be deemed harmful to minors within the meaning of the act”, and the law would, they say, require them to either put an age confirmation button at the front of their website, or force them to look through everything available on their websites, and put an age confirmation button in front of each potentially inappropriate page.
Britton Trice, owner of Garden District Book Shop, said that “since we cannot possibly review the million-plus titles on our website, the law would force us to ask every customer … whether he or she is an adult”. This, said Trice, “would have a strong and chilling effect on our business because it would make us appear to be an adult bookstore”.
The lawsuit was brought by Media Coalition and the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the plaintiffs. It also highlights the new law’s failure to distinguish between “older minors” and younger children, saying that “there is a broad range of material that has serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for some 17-year-olds that might be considered harmful to a 10 or 12-year-old.
“If a bookseller complied with the act by placing an age attestation button in front of the entire website, that would prevent all minors from purchasing any book at all,” it says. “A 15-year-old could not purchase Little House on the Prairie as a gift for her eight-year-old sister.”
Tom Lowenburg, co-owner of Octavia Books, called the law “a serious threat to the First Amendment rights of booksellers and our customers”. “Our job is to get customers the books they want, but this law makes it impossible by forcing us to block access to 16- and 17-year-olds who want to browse young adult novels and other works that may be inappropriate for younger minors,” he said.
The plaintiffs also point out in the lawsuit, which calls for the act to be declared “unconstitutional and void”, that most material published online, including potentially harmful reading, is not published in Louisiana. So the age-confirmation buttons for Louisianans “will do nothing whatsoever” to prevent accessing inappropriate material elsewhere.
But Timothy Burns, who drafted the bill, told the Associated Press that it was aimed at “pornographic content, not a romance novel”, and that the law will not apply to businesses that do not distribute pornography.
“It was to target internet pornography,” he said. “I doubt they have anything pornographic on their websites.”
