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Quote:A federal trial that began Monday in Philadelphia will decide whether operators of Web sites can be jailed and fined for not blocking children's access to materials deemed "harmful" to them.

The U.S. Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) in 1998, and the law has never been enforced because of court challenges against it. A federal district court in Philadelphia and a federal appeals court have found the law unconstitutional on freedom of speech grounds, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ban on enforcement of the law in June 2004.

The Supreme Court, however, asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to decide whether any changes in technology would affect the constitutionality of the law. The high court wanted the district court to look into issues such as whether commercially available blocking software was as effective as the banned law in blocking "harmful" material...

Quote:A federal judge dealt another blow to efforts to restrict children's access to online pornography by striking down the controversial Child Online Protection Act on the grounds that it violated First Amendment rights. The judge said that parents can effectively protect their children using filters and other technologies that don't infringe on the rights of others...

"Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection," he said...

This decision is hardly the end of the road for COPA, which has its fierce defenders.

"From this decision, it is likely to go to the Court of Appeals and then probably to the Supreme Court," ...