Amendments have been proposed to California’s previously adopted age verification law, introducing an exception for projects under open licenses. The relevant committee will vote on the adoption of the amendments in June. Previously, similar amendments were approved in the state of Colorado and were included in the final version of the law final version of the law CO SB51, adopted in early May.
The amendments narrow the concepts of “operating system provider” and “application” to which age verification requirements apply. The amendments exclude individuals and organizations that distribute operating systems or applications under licenses that allow copying, distribution and changes to the code from the law. The exception also applies to software that is not offered to consumers in the form of individual executable files through application stores.
If the amendments are approved, open source application developers and distributions such as Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux and Debian that provide open source software will not be required to comply with age verification requirements. Distributions and platforms, such as SteamOS, that include proprietary programs or are tied to external proprietary application directories, will have to take into account verification requirements Age.
California’s Age Verification Act mandates that operating systems add the ability to indicate a user’s age during account registration and provide applications with a programming interface to determine the age of the current user. As required by law, downloaded and running applications must be able to receive age information from the operating system in 4 gradations: under 13 years old, 13 to 16 years old, 16 to 18 years old, 18 years old and older.
The application developer must use the obtained age information to comply with child online protection laws. Failure to comply carries penalties of up to $2,500 for an unintentional violation and up to $7,500 for a willful violation for each child affected. The law goes into effect in California on January 1, 2027, and in Colorado on July 1, 2028.