WASHINGTON, June 27: In its first free-speech ruling for the computer age, the US Supreme Court said on Thursday that a Congressional attempt to keep pornography off the internet violated the constitution's first amendment.``The government's interest in keeping children away from harmful materials does not justify an unnecessarily broad suppression of speech addressed to adults,'' the justices said.

Congress' 1996 legislation would have made it a crime to put `indecent or patently offensive' words or pictures online, where they could be found and unloaded by children. Violators could have been sentenced to two years in prison and a $ 2,50,000 fine.

The law was challenged by many groups, including civil libertarians, computer companies and librarians. Attorney Bruce Ennis, who argued the case for those groups, called the court's 7-2 ruling `the legal birth certificate for the internet.' Computer and civil liberties groups hailed the ruling as extending free-speech protections toward the 21st century.

The court's vote affirmed a Pennsylvania court ruling that struck down the 1996 law.

Even the two dissenting justices agreed that parts of the measure improperly restricted communication among adults.

Writing for the court, Justice John Paul Stevens noted an earlier ruling which said `restriction on speech amounted to burning the house to roast the pig.' He said the attempts by Congress to keep certain material off the computer network threatened to torch a large segment of the internet community.

But supporters of the law complained the court's action left children vulnerable to lewd words and pictures easily obtained online.Senator Dan Coats, who sponsored the law, said the justices were telling parents to abandon any hope of a decent and agreeable public culture.

Christian Coalition president Donald Hodel said the ruling left millions of children vulnerable to exploitation by pornographers.

President Bill Clinton said he would meet industry leaders, parents and teachers on Tuesday to find a solution. ``Let the internet grow, we will not strangle it. The framers of the constitution wrote the first amendment with quill pens on parchment, but their words have no less meaning on a video monitor.''

The ruling was the court's first decision involving the rapidly expanding global computer network, which is thought to connect about 40 million people using more than 9.4 million computers worldwide.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.