An Internet porn law introduced in 1998 to block children from viewing pornography Web sites was effectively sacked by a federal judge on Thursday.

An anti-porn law violates free speech rights, U.S. District Court Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr. deemed on Thursday.

Federal lawmakers introduced Child Online Protection Act in 1998 to protect children from accessing porn and other indecent material on the Internet.

The law would have threatened commercial Web sites with fines up to $50,000 a day and six months in prison for each day they disseminated information deemed "harmful to children."

Reed said the law failed to address new technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing, community sites, and foreign sources, but at the same time it affects the freedom speech protected under the U.S. Constitution.

American Civil Liberties Union had argued that the provisions of the Child Online Protection Act were too restrictive and violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that protects free speech.

"I may not turn a blind eye to the law ... to protect this nation's youth by upholding a flawed statute, especially when a more effective and less restrictive alternative is readily available," Judge Reed wrote in his ruling.

He added that while he supports the idea of restricting children and teenagers from seeing pornography online, other means that were less restrictive of free speech, such as software filters, are more effective to block questionable content.

Government lawyers had argued that Internet filters are indeed ineffective in blocking XXX-rated content since most parents do not use them.