Editing Communications Decency Act (section)

===Legal challenges===
On June 12, 1996, a panel of [[United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania|federal judges]] in [[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania|Philadelphia]] blocked part of the CDA, saying it would infringe upon adults' free speech rights. The next month, another federal court in [[New York City|New York]] struck down the portion of the CDA intended to protect children from indecent speech as too broad. On June 26, 1997, the [[Supreme Court of the United States|Supreme Court]] upheld the Philadelphia court's decision in ''[[Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union]],'' stating that the indecency provisions were an unconstitutional abridgement of the First Amendment because they did not permit parents to decide for themselves what material was acceptable for their children, extended to non-commercial speech, and did not carefully define the words "indecent" and "offensive". (The Court affirmed the New York case, [[Joe Shea|''Reno v. Shea'']], the next day, without a published opinion.)

In 2003, Congress amended the CDA to remove the indecency provisions struck down in ''Reno v. ACLU''. A separate challenge to the provisions governing obscenity, known as [[Barbara Nitke#Nitke v. Gonzales|''Nitke v. Gonzales'']], was rejected by a federal court in New York in 2005. The Supreme Court summarily affirmed that decision in 2006.

Congress has made two narrower attempts to regulate children's exposure to Internet indecency since the Supreme Court overturned the CDA. Court injunction blocked enforcement of the first, the [[Child Online Protection Act]] (COPA), almost immediately after its passage in 1998; the law was later overturned. While legal challenges also dogged COPA's successor, the [[Children's Internet Protection Act]] (CIPA) of 2000, the Supreme Court upheld it as constitutional in 2004.