ABSTRACT
In Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, 535 US 564, the US Supreme Court sustained an injunction against enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, Congress's second attempt to protect children from exposure to indecent material on the Internet and the World Wide Web. The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web as vehicles for providing information and entertainment makes access to pornographic and indecent material easy and anonymous for adults and children. The US Supreme Court struck it down in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 US 844, and declared that Internet speech is entitled to the same First Amendment protection as are other forms of speech. In February 1999, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania granted the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) a preliminary injunction preventing enforcement of Child Online Protection Act until the case could be tried, concluding that the ACLU was likely to win at trial.
