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Constitutional Law Keyed to Stone
ASHCROFT v. AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION
Citation:
535 U.S. 564 (2002)Facts
Congress enacted the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) in 1998 after the Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act in Reno v. ACLU. COPA was narrower than the CDA, applying only to material on the World Wide Web, only to communications made for commercial purposes, and only to material that is “harmful to minors” as defined by a three-part test similar to the Miller obscenity standard. The ACLU and various other organizations that maintained websites with sexually oriented content challenged COPA’s constitutionality before it went into effect. They argued that the statute’s reliance on “community standards” to identify harmful material would effectively force Web publishers to abide by the standards of the most restrictive community in the country, since they cannot limit access to their sites based on geographic location. The District Court granted a preliminary injunction, and the Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that COPA’s use of community standards rendered it substantially overbroad.
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