An adult entertainment group’s legal challenge of a Louisiana law requiring age verification for state residents to access sexually explicit websites was dismissed in part by a federal judge.
Judge Susie Morgan of the Eastern District of Louisiana rejected the parts of the lawsuit filed by the Free Speech Coalition and other plaintiffs. Morgan granted the motion by the defendants – including the state’s public safety secretary, commissioner of the Louisiana Division of Administration and Attorney General Jeff Landry – to dismiss the plaintiffs’ claims stemming from sovereign immunity rights and the plaintiffs’ lack of standing based on injuries suffered.
The Louisiana law, which took effect at the beginning of this year, bans website owners from distributing explicit content to minors and holds companies liable if they fail to perform age-verification methods to ensure only those age 18 or older have access to such material.
“Crucially, the act is ‘intended to provide (through private actions) a civil remedy for damages against commercial entities who distribute harmful material to minors,’” Morgan said in her Oct. 4 decision. “The act does not explicitly charge any government official or entity with enforcement. Instead, the act may be enforced only through private actions.”
The plaintiffs had sought an injunction preventing the defendants from taking part in enforcing the statute, based on arguments that the law violated the First and 14th amendments, but Morgan was not persuaded.
“Binding any of the defendants through such a judgment, were the court to have jurisdiction to do so, would not bind any of the private citizens who may bring a suit under the act,” she said. “... Any such declaration against Commissioner (Jay) Dardenne, Secretary (James) LeBlanc or AG Landry would not bind any of those private citizens who may bring suit under the act. …”
A spokesman for the Free Speech Coalition said plaintiffs would continue the legal battle due to the wide-ranging impacts of the Louisiana law.
“We'll be appealing the recent ruling, given that the laws are already having a chilling effect on our members, as well as the citizens of Louisiana who want to access First Amendment protected speech,” Mike Stabile told the Louisiana Record in an email. “Most Louisianans refuse to upload IDs to adult sites, meaning that sites that institute age-verification see drops between 80% to 95% in traffic from legal adults.”
The coalition does not want minors to obtain access to the adult websites, according to Stabile, but the law excludes the adult content available on social media platforms or pirate websites.
“The law as written punishes legal, compliant sites while fueling the growth of illegal sites that don’t comply,” he said.
The coalition also argues that age-verification laws have limited effectiveness because the website would have to depend on geolocation data provided by the user’s device to determine which state the user resides in.
“It is extremely simple to use a virtual private network (VPN) to make it appear as though a user is located elsewhere, thereby evading age checks,” a post on the coalition’s website states. “In fact, a recent study of middle-schoolers (youth aged 11 to 14) found that 41% of them use a VPN to browse the internet.”
In addition, the methods the Louisiana law provides for age verification, which include providing digitized government-issued identification to the website, means sensitive data would have to be transmitted over the internet, leading to potential private data breaches.