Internet free speech activists have succeeded in their bid to overturn 1998’s Child Online Protection Act (COPA) on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment to the US Constitution. COPA would have required web sites to extract proof of age from visitors before giving them access to material deemed harmful to children (CI No 3,582). While sympathetic to the desire to protect minors that motivated the framers of the law, US District Court Judge Lowell Reed concluded that the plaintiffs – a group of commercial web sites led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) – had established a likelihood of irreparable harm. The hard fact is that sometimes we must make decisions that we do not like, Judge Reed wrote. We make them because they are right, right in the sense that the law and the Constitution, as we see them, compel the result… Indeed perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.
