Yeah about that, the link you posted doesn't say that. In fact, it was only explaining both sides of the arguments before the court as the case was appealed to the supreme court. The actual verdict is that SCOTUS upheld the pandering provision of the Act which btw was the only part that was found to be unconstitutional by the 11th circuit. Note that the defendant wasn't arguing that his actions shouldn't be illegal under the law but that the law was overbroad and thus would mean that someone who doesn't actually possess child porn (which all parties agreed the defendant did) could be prosecuted for offering what he believed to be child porn. This was important because the fbi doesn't use real children in the photos they trade. They use cgi to make older women look like children. So if someone talks to an FBI agent and says they have child porn but what they have is fake cp, they can still go to jail.
Now in
US v Handley, a district court agreed that parts of the PROTECT act,
18 U.S. Code § 1466A, which concerned both drawings and real images, were unconstitutional but they still agreed that that the case could proceed to trial on the obscenity provisions. That was the case of the guy who ordered loli hentai mangas from Japan. Still, he only got 6 months and didn't have to register as a sex offender. This seems to indicate to me that the government weren't confident in a constitutional challenge.
However, a later case,
US. v Dean in the 11th circuit upheld the constitutionality of those sections though the case concerned real images.
Ironically, under the PROTECT act however, the 1000 year old dragon defense might actually work since it requires that the work depict or appear to depict a minor. But if the work makes the age clear, it might not qualify under the act.
TLDR: they are partially right. The PROTECT act on the whole hasn't been declared unconstitutional. 2 parts of it which defined CP without specifying that the material had to be obscene were declared unconstitutional in a Iowa district court but were later found constitutional by the 11th circuit. Technically though, it is up to a jury to decide whether material not depicting real children is either obscene or "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value". Good luck with that in America though.
