Mike Godwin

In 1998 Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a bill that makes it unlawful for material that is “harmful to minors” to be posted on the Internet unless steps are taken to ensure that children cannot access the material. However, in June 2000 the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that COPA is unconstitutional. In the following viewpoint Mike Godwin claims that the Third Circuit was correct to question the validity of COPA because the act’s reliance on community standards to determine which material can be considered obscene is problematic for website publishers. According to Godwin, these publishers—whose works reach people throughout the world, not just their own municipalities—cannot guarantee that their sites will meet the standards of the most restrictive communities unless they...