In a victory for online free speech, the U.S. Supreme Court today refused to hear the government's appeal of a July 2008 ruling holding the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA) unconstitutional and enjoining COPA's enforcement. The case was brought by the ACLU, EFF, and a coalition of plaintiffs.Today's decision marks the end of the road for COPA, a federal law that violated the First Amendment by imposing civil and criminal penalties on commercial website operators that publish sexually explicit material without also using credit card authentication or other technological measures to verify viewer age and block access by minors.
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COPA was passed after the Supreme Court struck down its predecessor, the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA), in its landmark decision ACLU v. Reno, the first Supreme Court case to apply the First Amendment to online speech.
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