New law to criminalize trickery by adult website owners

According to this News.com article, President Bush is expected to sign the Child Protection Safety Act (also known as the Walsh Act), touted as “the most extensive rewriting of federal laws relating to child pornography, sex offender registration and child exploitation in a decade.”

The comprehensive legisltation will establish, among other things, a national sex offender registry, and will provide funding for pilot programs to implement GPS technology in tracking convicted sex offenders.

Of particular importance to website owners is a provision in the act that would make it a crime to “knowingly embed[] words or digital images into the source code of a website with the intent to deceive a person into viewing material constituting obscenity.” Moreover, the act would prohibit adding content to a site with “the intent to deceive a minor into viewing material harmful to minors on the Internet.”

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