"Supreme Court lets Internet porn law die"

That's the headline the Los Angeles Times ran today, just as I was writing this post.

I've previously posted about ACLU v. Mukasey, in which the Third Circuit held that the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA) violates the First Amendment by prohibiting constitutionally protected "indecent" speech.

As the LAT notes, the Court had previously heard this case as Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004). Then, the Court upheld a preliminary injunction by a 5-4 vote, permitting the case to go forward and the lower courts to consider whether Internet filtering software provided an appropriate alternative to the strict provisions of COPA. Now that that Court has decided not to hear the case again on its ultimate merits, the Third Circuit's ruling of last year stands, and the law, which never took effect, appears to be dead.

Yes, COPA law was passed in 1998, and in ten years it never took effect because it was bouncing around the court system. One doesn't like to think of the money the Bush Administration spent defending it, even after the Supreme Court said it was likely to lose. Now the Court -- apparently satisfied by the extensive factfinding below that the law is a needless exercise in censorship -- has taken the unusual step of declining to review a lower court's decision that invalidates a federal law. What a great way to start the next four years: with a flat repudiation of yet another Bush Administration boondoggle.

UPDATE: Jack Balking has a post on "The End of the COPA Saga" at Balkinization. He notes that one issue suggested by, but not adjudicated in, the case is, "Who should bear the burden of filtering and blocking unwanted content in an digital environment and where should the filtering decisions be located?" Essentially because one size does not fit all, he concludes that "the Internet should place filtering decisions and responsibilities on the end user, not the publisher of the content."