Supreme Court Partially Upholds COPA

from the not-that-surprising dept

The Supreme Court has sent the lawsuit about the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) back to the federal appeals court saying that just because the law uses the "community standards" test to determine what's obscene, doesn't mean it's unconstitutional. I'm trying to remember back to various law classes I took years ago, and I'm pretty sure that the "community standards" test is pretty much accepted practice for determining what counts as pornography - so the ruling doesn't come as that big of a surprise. Using the standard "I am not a lawyer" caveat, I would think that with that standard in place, I would try to argue that the "community" of the internet is much broader than the local community, in order to suggest that the bar needs to be much higher. However, as the Supreme Court says, there are still many other points on which the law could be found unconstitutional.

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