As their state teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, and they chose a madam-frequenting, diaper-fetishizing adulterer to lead them to the governor's office, the Louisiana Republicans decided it was time to regulate internet book sales.

The Guardian: 

Two New Orleans bookshops are challenging a new Louisiana law that requires websites publishing material deemed harmful to minors to verify the age of their users, saying it would make them appear incorrectly to be “adult” bookstores.

Passed earlier this summer, the law says that failure to “electronically acknowledge and attest that the person seeking to access the [harmful to minors] material is 18 years of age or older” will “constitute the unlawful distribution of material harmful to minors through the internet”, risking a fine of up to $10,000 (£6,500).

In a federal lawsuit filed this week [PDF], bookshops Octavia Books and the Garden District Book Shop, together with Future Crawfish Paper LLC, the publisher of Antigravity magazine, the American Booksellers Association and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, say the new requirement violates the First Amendment rights of booksellers and publishers.

None of the books offered by the bookshops are “obscene”, they write, but “some might be deemed harmful to minors within the meaning of the act”, and the law would, they say, require them to either put an age confirmation button at the front of their website, or force them to look through everything available on their websites, and put an age confirmation button in front of each potentially inappropriate page...