Remember when the DOJ went on that enormous fishing exercise under the guise of defending/resurrecting COPA, the Child Online Protection Act? Well, a Ed Felten tell us that the Federal judge just killed the act dead. We hope.
This is the end of a long legal process that started with the passage of COPA in 1999. The ACLU, along with various authors and publishers, immediately filed suit challenging COPA, and Judge Reed struck down the law. The case was appealed up to the Supreme Court, which generally supported Judge Reed’s ruling but remanded the case back to him for further proceedings because enough time had passed that the technological facts might have changed. Judge Reed held another trial last fall, at which I testified. Now he has ruled, again, that COPA is unconstitutional.