Legal Research

At long last COPA dies.

By scott

The US Supreme Court has decided not to hear the appeal by the US government against a Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision (itself upholding a District Court ruling (remanded from the Supreme Court) that, the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA) is unconstitutional. Whilst I think this is great news, I also must admit that I am surprised that the Court passed on this - especially considering that it was a 5-4 split that originally remanded the case.

COPA was the US Government?s second attempt at protecting children online. Its first attempt, the 1996 Communications Decency Act (the CDA), was also struck down by the Supreme Court in Reno v American Civil Liberties Union , where the court found that the Act?s ?indecent? and ?patently offensive? provision abridged freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment. COPA did not fair much better, with the courts affirming the original District Court opinion blocking Congress from enforcing it. That court found that the act was not the least restrictive means of accomplishing the government?s objectives - the use of filtering software could actually exceed the protection available under the law - and violated the First Amendment rights of US website operators. In particular, the court(s) found that COPA could not withstand a strict scrutiny, vagueness, or overbreadth analysis and thus is unconstitutional.

I pleased to see this law finally laid to rest. The disappointment is in the 10 wasted years, and wasted money by the US government continuing to fight for a law they knew was fatally flawed; and the irony of arguing in another case - the case of the Children?s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which makes federal funding of libraries conditional upon their use of filters - that filters were the answer, whilst at the same time arguing they were not the answer to protect children from the very same content in COPA.

Full post as published by Information Overload on January 22, 2009 (boomark / email).