Can we FINALLY stick a fork in COPA?

Your tax dollars and mine would like to think that the third time is indeed the charm for killing off COPA, the smugly misnamed Child Online Protection Act. Indeed, some of the readers within the, uh, sound of my keyboard were themselves children when this mess of First Amendment abuse initially reared its head as the Communications Decency Act, heaved into Senate debate in 1995 by J. James Exon (R-Nebr.) and formally introduced by Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), responding in turn to a Time article claiming that Usenet was approximately 83 percent composed of porn images. The article was written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who based his claims on a study by Carnegie-Mellon pr0nhound undergrad Martin Rimm.

The CDA, however, didn't tackle obscenity; instead, it made vague "prurient interest" claims that could have made illegal everything from sex-ed info to images of bare breasts. (Idle thought: What on earth would the folks who drafted the CDA made of the furry community?) The CDA passed Congress in as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 despite full-throated opposition from the Net community it was struck down in 1997 by the Supremes (Reno v ACLU). COPA, the modestly reworked successor (targeting only commercial speech and only US-based firms), has been 11 years of failure. The was an injunction against enforcement slapped on COPA immediately after its passage in 1997. It was struck down by the Third Court of Appeals in '98.

That decision was reviewed by the Supreme Court and kicked back to the fightin' Third in 2002 for, not to put too fine a point on it, insufficiently strong reasoning. The Third shoots COPA down again in 2003. The Department of Justice appeals; the Supremes get it again (Ashcroft v ACLU -- same song, different conductor) and -- commenting that COPA was likely to eventually prove unconstitutional -- uphold the enforcement injunction in ... dizzy yet? too bad ... 2004, kicking it back to a district court with comments that filtering technology had almost certainly exceeded the law's capabilities. The next district trial began in 2006 (ACLU v Mukasey -- hey, wait long enough and they'll put your name on this thing), engendering a raft from subpoenas from Justice to various search sites; Google earned a certain amount of love for resisting that call. The district court struck COPA down again in 2007, acidly noting that perhaps an intact First Amendment was a more suitable protection for the youth of America than COPA would be; the Third got the case after that, and here we are with a third Third smackdown today, 22 July 2008.

So where are they now, those CDA launchers of yore? Jim Exon, essentially a decent man out of his depth and out of his era, passed in 2005; Chuck Grassley, who later acquitted himself more admirably on issues such as whistleblowing, is still in the Senate. Elmer-DeWitt actually thrived on the controversy, eventually rising to senior editor at Time before shuffling along to an Apple-coverage startup and later Fortune, from which he took a buyout package last month. And Marty Rimm? Possibly still in traction from the online beatdown he took over that extraordinarily unscientific "study," because after his 15 minutes he vanished pretty much utterly. (Which... you know, at least young Robert Morris had the stones to own his vast Net-harming miscalculations. That's all I'm saying.)

And the money? Those millions of dollars and countless man-hours that the Department of Justice has blown over the past two administrations to put coat after coat of lipstick on this pig? Well, they say the definition of schizophrenia is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I'd like to think the government -- with the Net so much more fully understood by the citizenry, and with so much more important stuff for DoJ to contend with than nakey pictures -- will take a hint and drop the matter altogether. What do you suppose the odds are of that?