The Child Online Protection Act, now a decade old, appears to be permanently, completely, and otherwise absolutely dead now that the Supreme Court has rejected Bush Administration pleas to consider reviving the law one more time. According to the Associated Press, the rejection was made without comment by the justices. COPA was passed back in 1998 under President Clinton after the earlier Communications Decency Act contained some much broader provisions that were eventually struck down. To keep children away from harmful (mostly pornographic) content, COPA was drawn up to be narrower in scope. As passed, though, the bill required US-based websites displaying anything that might violate "contemporary community standards" to bar kids from accessing the material. Those failing to comply with the law would face fines of up to $50,000 and six months in prison. Opponents of the law sued to block enforcement almost immediately, and in the ten years since the law was passed, it has never been enforced. The law has passed up and down the court system repeatedly, already ending up in the Supreme Court once already in 2004, when enforcement of COPA was blocked pending further review.
