kalpurna

You know how fandom is absolutely plastered with warnings saying "don't read this if you're under the age of 18?" Turns out that in most cases, at least in the US, that's totally not illegal.

Tonight, in a fit of curiosity, I googled the Child Online Protection act. After hacking my way through a forest of legal language, I learned the following interesting facts:

The COPA defines "minor" as under the age of 17, not under the age of 18, as I had previously believed. (NC-17 movies, on the other hand, are illegal for kids under the age of 18. Which makes absolutely no sense.)

It also does not apply to non-commercial sites. COPA applies only to persons who seek to profit from placing harmful-to-minors material on the Web as a regular course of their business. Which means that explicit fanfic is not actually illegal for American minors to access.

And if you can argue that fanfiction has artistic or literary value, an argument which plenty of academics will in fact support, you're even better off. COPA is narrowly limited to material that is designed to appeal to the prurient interest of minors and that, "taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."

Furthermore, it does not restrict parents from allowing their children to access explicit material. So if you're a minor living at home, and your parents are cool people, you're fine. My parents, for example, never restricted my access to such things, and it's not because they didn't know I was looking at them.

And, yeah, of course we still have to cover our asses in other countries, and all that. So it's not like I'm saying you should lose the warnings. But still.

Learn something new every day, huh?