SALT LAKE CITY, UT – U.S. District Court Judge Dale A. Kimball heard the Free Speech Coalition’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of Utah’s Child Protection Registry (CPR) last Wednesday, in the case Free Speech Coalition v. Shurtleff (No. 2:05-cv-00949).According to a press release issued today by the FSC, its legal team found Judge Kimball to be receptive to their arguments.

“The hearing went well,” FSC attorney Jerome Mooney stated in the press release. “The judge ignored the opposition’s motion to strike and seemed very interested in the dormant commerce clause argument.”

Should Judge Kimball grant the preliminary injunction, FSC members would be protected from enforcement of the law, which the FSC says is already costing some adult businesses tens of thousands of dollars each month to comply with.

Constitutional lawyer Stephen Rhode, who argued the case on behalf of FSC, said that the judge was “attentive to our claims that it violates the Constitution for individual states to impose burdensome requirements which could force companies to submit their emails lists to 50 different registries.”

To date, Utah and Michigan are the only states to have enacted do-not-email registries, ostensibly in furtherance of protecting children. In Utah, however, an error on the part of the state has already resulted in disclosure of the email addresses of four minors whose email addresses are entered into the registry – demonstrating just one of the many potential problems with the registry.

In its press release, the FSC restated its central arguments in the case: “The CPR is a hopelessly flawed law that not only fails to protect children but violates the First Amendment and Commerce Clause of the U. S. Constitution, and is preempted by the federal CAN-SPAM Act which regulates unsolicited emails under a uniform national system.”

“The effort to enjoin Utah’s CPR is an important part of FSC’s litigation strategy to challenge oppressive statutes which not only burden lawful expression and commerce, but in this case actually expose minors to unwanted intrusion by creating a convenient registry which the Federal Trade Commission believes can be easily hacked,” said board chair Jeffrey Douglas, who is supervising the litigation.

The FSC is supported in its motion by the American Advertising Federation, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers, Inc., the Email Service Provider Coalition, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology; all of the groups received from the Court to participate in the litigation in support of the FSC.

In its press release, the FSC states that the Coalition thanks its members and others in the adult industry for their support of the FSC fight against Utah’s CPR, stating that the Coalition “share the industry’s disdain for those who use the protection of children as a pretense to push legislation that does not protect children, and in fact makes them more vulnerable to potential exploitation, and we ask the industry to continue support us in these important battles against abusive laws.”

Mooney said that the Judge’s ruling might be announced in mid-December, at the earliest.