Carl Richell, founder and CEO of System76, which develops the Pop!_OS distribution and the COSMIC desktop environment, successfully influenced changes to a bill being proposed in the state of Colorado CO SB51 (Colorado Senate Bill 51) that would establish age verification requirements for operating systems. An amendment has been included in the bill to exempt distributions and applications provided under open licenses from the scope of the upcoming law.
The revisions approved by the relevant committee of the Colorado House of Representatives state that operating system providers and developers who distribute their software under licenses allowing copying, distribution, and modification of the code will not be subject to the law. This exception only applies to software products that do not impose additional conditions, such as technical or legal restrictions on installing modified versions.
Colorado’s age verification bill has already passed the Senate and is now pending review by the House of Representatives and the governor’s signature. The bill mirrors a law currently in effect in California, which mandates operating systems to include a feature for users to input their age during account registration and provide applications with a software interface to determine the user’s age.
Under the law’s requirements, downloaded and running applications must be capable of receiving age information from the operating system in four categories: under 13, 13 to 16, 16 to 18, and 18 and older. App developers must utilize this age data to comply with child online protection laws. Non-compliance could result in penalties of up to $2,500 for unintentional violations and up to $7,500 for intentional violations per affected child.
Recently, a bill has been introduced in the US Congress aimed at enacting a federal age verification law that would be applicable to all states in the US.