Child Online Protection Act

Child Online Protection Act

Acronyms (colloquial)	COPA
Citations
Public law	Pub. L.Tooltip Public Law (United States) 105–277 (text) (PDF)
Statutes at Large	112 Stat. 2681-736
Codification
Titles amended	47
U.S.C. sections created	47 U.S.C. § 231
Legislative history
Introduced in the House as H.R. 4328 Signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 21, 1998
United States Supreme Court cases
Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union I 535 U.S. 564 (2002) Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union II, 542 U.S. 656 (2004)

The Child Online Protection Act^[1] (COPA)^[2] was a law in the United States of America, passed in 1998 with the declared purpose of restricting access by minors to any material defined as harmful to such minors on the Internet. The law, however, never took effect, as three separate rounds of litigation led to a permanent injunction against the law in 2009.

The law was part of a series of efforts by US lawmakers legislating over Internet pornography. Parts of the earlier and much broader Communications Decency Act had been struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1997 (Reno v. ACLU^[3]); COPA was a direct response to that decision, narrowing the range of material covered. COPA only limits commercial speech and only affects providers based within the United States.

COPA required all commercial distributors of "material harmful to minors" to restrict their sites from access by minors. "Material harmful to minors" was defined as material that by "contemporary community standards" was judged to appeal to the "prurient interest" and that showed sexual acts or nudity (including female breasts). This is a much broader standard than obscenity.