Child Online Protection Act - the U.S. Supreme Court Speaks

Whether it is in the area of taxation or free speech, the Internet poses vexing legal issues that are unique to this global network of communication and expression. The most recent case of significance relating to the Internet is the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision involving the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). (See Ashcroft v. ACLU, et al., 122 S.Ct. 1700 (May 13, 2002) (formerly captioned Reno v. ACLU).) As with several other high-profile Internet cases, this decision involves the somewhat inherent tension between the Internet and the First Amendment vis-a-vis legislation whose purpose is to protect children from harmful material posted on the Internet.

Congress’ first attempt to protect children from harmful material on the Internet was the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA), which sought to prohibit the transmission of, inter alia, indecent and patently offensive material to persons under 18 years of age. In Reno v. ACLU, et al, 521 U.S. 844 (1997) (Reno I), the Supreme Court struck down most of the CDA because it lacked “the precision that the First Amendment requires when a statute regulates the content of speech,” and because “in order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppressed a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another.” As such, the court determined that the CDA had a “chilling effect” on free speech.