Source: Free Speech Coalition (FSC)
By: Company Press Release
(CANOGA PARK, CA) — Free Speech Coalition (FSC) announced today that, in a joint agreement with the defendants, the case Free Speech Coalition v. Shurtleff Utah Attorney General was dismissed.
The alleged purpose of Utah’s Child Protection Registry Act (CPR Act; Utah Code Ann. § 13-29-101) is to protect minors from receiving email messages that promote products or services that cannot be lawfully sold to them and/or contain material that is ”harmful to minors,” as defined by Utah (Utah Code Ann. § 76- 10-1202(4)). It purports to do this by establishing a ”Do not Email” registry containing email addresses that belong to, or can be accessed by, Utah minor and requires email marketers to ”scrub” their lists against the registry for a per- scrub fee of $0.005.
Diane Duke, executive director for the Free Speech Coalition explained,
There are a number of ways in which litigation can be useful. In the case of FSC v. Shurtleff, we learned all that we needed to know through discovery. What we learned was:
§ the burden of the complaints rested more on the drug, alcohol and tobacco industries not the adult entertainment industry.
§ Most complaints resulted from emails about male-enhancement drugs.
§ not only has Utah spent substantial funds to administer the program, but Utah also has not been able to recover one cent in fines from companies that they prosecuted.
”The program is a complete failure,” Duke continued. ”No state with any fiscal intelligence whatsoever would even consider such a program. That is all we needed to know from the litigation so we moved to dismiss”
Duke stated that FSC will continue to monitor the situation and if any real threat arises, that FSC will work with its coalition partners in the alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical industries to eradicate the threat.
Established in 1991, the Free Speech Coalition’s mission is to lead, protect and support the growth and well-being of the adult entertainment community.
