One of Ours

The US Supreme Court wrapped up its session by announcing a decision which bars the enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). The COPA, passed in 1998, was an attempt by Congress to keep pornography out of the reach of children on the Internet by requiring credit cards, access codes, or other means of age verification to access adult content, with fines of up to US$50,000 for violations. By a 5-4 decision, the Court remanded the case back to a lower court for a trial to resolve the issues raised in the original lawsuit filed by the ACLU, saying that the law as written violates free speech:

For now, the law, known as the Child Online Protection Act, would sweep with too broad a brush, [Justice] Kennedy wrote. "There is a potential for extraordinary harm and a serious chill upon protected speech" if the law took effect, he said.

What is especially interesting about the ruling is that the Court was able to recognize the technological issues at hand in addition to the more obvious free speech ones. Kennedy noted the inadequacies of filtering software and felt that a full trial was necessary to determine if there have been enough in the way of technical advances to make the legislation feasible. (Psst, Justice Kennedy: the answer is "no.")...