Well, it’s been a while since I last posted. Not like there hasn’t been wonderful things that have happened since December. A movie about a mall cop, for example, is numero uno at the box office. And the weather has been very nice lately, which is always nice. Oh, and something about an inauguration, that happened too.
In any event, a very controversial law is no more. COPA (or the Child Online Protection Act) was passed in 1998, and it imposed criminal penalties against those who posted “any material” that was “harmful” to minors. (This was not one of the great things to come out of the Clinton era.) The case bumped along for a decade, as detailed in this CNET article, until the Third Court of Appeals in Philly ruled that there were less-restrictive ways to keep minors from seeing “harmful” material. The government petitioned for a writ of certiorari, but the SCOTUS has declined to hear the case.
So COPA is dead.
