RIP COPA

In 1996, the Communications Decency Act was passed, making it illegal to make obscene or indecent material available on the Internet where a minor could access it. The nascent Internet community reacted, with an estimated five to ten percent of online websites switching to black backgrounds (including Yahoo!) for 48 hours, and a massive "blue ribbon campaign" that saw blue ribbons on thousands of homepages for several months.

The law was never enforced, as a federal panel of judges enacted an injunction against it, and by the next year it had been overturned completely. A horrible law that died a quick clean death.

So, given Congress's penchant for attempting to pass an unconstitutional law by ramming it down the public's throat, the measure was pushed through Congress the following year (1998) under a new name, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). COPA limited the restrictions to commercial enterprises, but clarified the obscenity requirements to include all nudity, including female breasts. Medical health sites were among the many outraged by the new law, which would have required a credit card or other proof of age to access information on how to perform cancer self-exams.

The law was, once again, subject to an immediate injunction. The following year, the law was struck down. However, unlike the CDA, it was not quickly killed. The Attorney General chose to appeal the ruling, and by 2004 the Supreme Court reviewed the case and upheld the unjunction, but referred the case to a lower court for trial.

The Department of Justice then issued subpeonas to various Internet search engines for search records. All search engines complied except for Google, which successfully fought the subpeona as illegal. The trial finally commenced, and this Thursday, a verdict was reached. COPA is finally dead, having been found to facially violate both the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. said in his ruling "[P]erhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection."

I have only two worries. The first is the inevitable third try Congress will attempt now that COPA is dead. The second is that this judge appears to think that you have to be eighteen to have free speech.

Labels: free speech, nanny state, personal freedoms

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