COPA Suffers Yet Another Court Defeat

A US federal appeals court today struck down COPA, the Child Online Protection Act, a Clinton-era censorship law that the Justice Department has been struggling to get implemented for a decade. (The ACLU filed suit as soon as COPA was signed in 1998 and won an immediate injunction.) The battle has made it to the Supreme Court twice, and the DoJ has essentially never gotten any satisfaction out of the courts. This was the case for which the DoJ famously went trolling for search histories. In the ruling issued today, the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower-court ruling that COPA violates the First Amendment because it is not the most effective way to keep children from visiting adult Web sites. The law would require sites to check visitors' ages, e.g. by taking a credit card, if the site contained any material that is "harmful to minors," whatever that means.

Comments

Absurd

[geekoid]

Yes, we should let people troll for children freely and leave it to the parents..wait a minute, you mean parents want to censor what their children are seeing? Censorship is wrong! Trust your children!

Hmmm. Did it occur to you that it was parents that wanted this?

Perhaps people should be allowed to stand on street corners and try to get children in their van?

You are wrong, it is everyone's job to raise children. Different degrees depending on the relationship.
Example:
I went, with some other parents, to a playground and cleaned it up. According to you, each child should have a parent hovering over it in case there is broken glass on the ground, and we shouldn'
t have done anything because , you know, other people should watch their children.
This was not a playground my children would play in, it's too far from our home.

So you look across the street and see some man beating his children with a stick, you do nothing becasue it's not your child?
I saw this and before I intervened the child was already bleeding from his nose, and ended up going to the ER for a few days.

Degrees from the relationship.