COPA dealt another legal setback

On March 22, a federal judge in Philadelphia permanently barred prosecutors from enforcing the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA, saying it was overly broad and would undoubtedly "chill a substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech for adults." The federal law would make it a crime for commercial Web sites to make "harmful to minors" material publicly available. Congress enacted COPA nearly a decade ago as part of an early wave of Internet censorship efforts, but the courts have repeatedly blocked its enforcement.
The law already had been reviewed in 2004 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed with a temporary ban on enforcement, but the justices said they wanted more information about the current state of filtering technology and stopped short of a definitive ruling on its constitutionality. In this newest decision, U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed implied that filtering technology has improved to the point where it is now more effective than the COPA legislation would be.