Child Online Protection Act

The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was an American statute, passed in 1998, with the declared purpose of restricting access to any material defined as harmful to minors on the Internet. The statute never took effect as three separate rounds of litigation led to a permanent injunction against it in 2009.

The statute was part of a series of efforts by American lawmakers to regulate and restrict Internet pornography and other types of indecent or obscene material. The earlier Communications Decency Act had been struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU in 1997. COPA was a direct response to that decision, narrowing the range of material covered. COPA only limited commercial speech and only affected content creators based in the United States. COPA also attempted to replace the previous statute's restrictions on "obscenity" and "indecency" with a rhetorical focus on protecting children from harm.

COPA required all commercial distributors of "material harmful to minors" to restrict their sites from access by under-age children. That content was defined as material that by "contemporary community standards" was judged to appeal to the "prurient interest" and that showed sexual acts or nudity (including female breasts). This is a much broader standard than obscenity.