Hey, it's all about the kids, man- what's wrong with you?
WWW- The Child Online Protection Act (COPA)[1] is a law in the United States of America, passed in 1998 with the declared purpose of protecting children from harmful sexual material on the internet. The law was blocked by the courts and has never taken effect. Because it only limited commercial speech and only affected US providers, the effect on the availability of the regulated material to minors if the law was enforced was unlikely to be significant. Several US states have since passed similar laws.
The law was part of the struggle of US lawmakers against the proliferation of internet pornography. Parts of the earlier and much broader Communications Decency Act had been struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court; COPA was a direct response to that decision, narrowing the range of material covered.
COPA required all commercial distributors of "material harmful to minors" to protect their sites from access by minors. "Material harmful to minors" was defined as material that by "contemporary community standards" was judged to appeal to the "prurient interest" and that showed sexual acts or nudity (including female breasts). This is a much lower standard than obscenity and covers all hardcore and softcore pornography.
An injunction blocking the federal government from enforcing COPA was obtained in 1998. In 1999, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the injunction and struck down the law, ruling that it was too broad in using "community standards" as part of the definition of harmful materials. In May 2002, the Supreme Court reviewed this ruling, found the given reason insufficient and returned the case to the Circuit Court; the law remained blocked. On March 6, 2003, the 3rd Circuit Court again struck down the law as unconstitutional, this time arguing that it would hinder protected speech among adults. The administration appealed.[2]
On 30 June 2004, in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union,[3] the Supreme Court upheld the block on enforcement, ruling that the law was likely to be unconstitutional. Notably, the court mentioned that "filtering's superiority to COPA is confirmed by the explicit findings of the Commission on Child Online Protection, which Congress created to evaluate the relative merits of different means of restricting minors' ability to gain access to harmful materials on the internet". The court also wrote that it was five years since the district court had considered the effectiveness of filtering software and that two less restrictive laws had been passed since COPA, one prohibiting misleading domain names and another creating a child-safe .kids domain, and that given the rapid pace of internet development those might be sufficient to protect children. The court referred the case back to the district court for further investigation and action.
