The Child Online Protection Act makes it a crime for anyone, by means of the World Wide Web, to make any communication for commercial purposes that is "harmful to minors" unless the person has restricted access by minors by requiring a credit card number. COPA imposes criminal and civil penalties of up to $50,000 per day for violations.
While more narrowly drafted than its predecessor, the Communications Decency Act (CDA), the COPA contains many of the same elements that ultimately led to the Supreme Court's ruling in 1997 that the CDA was unconstitutional. COPA places unconstitutional burdens on a wide category of protected speech, while failing to achieve its goal of protecting children.
COPA raises major constitutional problems in the following ways:
[Legislative History] [The Court Challenge] [COPA Commission]
Supreme Court Declines to Hear Appeal of "Remote DVR" Case - The Supreme Court today declined to reconsider a 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision holding that Cablevision's "remote storage digital video recorder" would not infringe copyright. CDT and a number of others had argued to the 2nd Circuit that a finding of copyright infringement had the potential to chill innovation in a wide range of emerging products that use the Internet to provide storage and computing functions from remote locations. The Supreme Court's action effectively ends the significant threat posed by a lower court's 2007 ruling of infringement. June 29, 2009
Share this articleCDT Joins Brief Urging Court to Correct Errors on Section 230 - CDT has joined Public Citizen and other groups on a "friend of the court" brief urging a U.S. Appeals Court to correct a point in a recent decision regarding "Section 230," a provision which enhances free speech online by protecting service providers from liability for content posted by their users. Section 230 is vital because without it, private sites such as Yahoo! or Youtube could not risk allowing Internet users to freely post content. In its recent decision in Barnes v. Yahoo!, the court incorrectly limited the ability of service providers to assert the protection of Section 230. The brief supports Yahoo's request to remove the incorrect section of the decision. May 22, 2009
Share this articleSupreme Court Ends 10-Year Government Quest for Censorship Bill - The Supreme Court Wednesday dealt the final blow to the government's 10-year campaign to place onerous restrictions on Internet content; the Court refused to hear the government's appeal of lower court rulings that found the Child Online Protective Act unconstitutional. "We applaud the Court's decision, which ends the government's quixotic and wasteful ten-year effort to impose an unconstitutional censorship standard on Internet content," said CDT President Leslie Harris. Since COPA passed there have been at least three major commissions or studies that have concluded that education and voluntary technology tools are the most effective way to protect kids online. CDT believes now is the time, in this changing political climate, to pursue new and constitutional ways to empower parents with practical ways to protect children online. January 21, 2009
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