After losing an appeals court challenge last July, proponents of 1998’s Child Online Protection Act received a final blow to their cause – this time from the United States Supreme Court, who quietly declined to review the law without comment.

COPA – not to be confused with COPPA – was passed overwhelming by congress under the Clinton administration; it sought to bar for-profit websites from allowing children access to materials deemed harmful for inappropriate to them, as judged by “contemporary community standards.”

As Daily Tech notes, COPA (Child Online Protection Act) is NOT to be confused with COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). Unlike COPPA, COPA would have done absolutely nothing to protect children online and certainly would have shattered whatever privacy children have left online. COPA was a shameful attempt to institute broad surveillance and censorship online under the banner of “child safety.” As U.S. District Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr. noted on March 22, 2007, during the last rejection of COPA by the courts:

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.

Of course – while this crappy piece of legislation died a long slow death in the courts, defending it provided Bush’s Justice Department with a great opportunity to seize private user information from information companies like Google and Yahoo.

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