... harmful to children does not violate the First Amendment. Writing the majority opinion in this case was Justice Clarence Thomas. He defended Congress's attempt to tone down the Communications Decency Act, which was declared unconstitutional in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union. While the CDA covered all aspects of the Internet including email, COPA applies only to material on the World Wide Web made "for commercial purposes." Also, COPA only restricts "material that is harmful to minors" unlike the CDA, which covered the broader realm of all "indecent and patently offensive communications." This opinion of the court asserted that COPA, by defining material harmful to minors in a parallel fashion to the court's definition of obscenity, would not restrict the wide range material Web in the way the Communications Decency Act had. In drawing up COPA, Congress used Miller v. California as a basis to define material harmful to minor ...

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