The COPINE scale is a rating system created in Ireland and used in the United Kingdom to categorise the severity of images of child sex abuse.
[2] The COPINE Project was founded in 1997, and is based in the Department of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Ireland.
Professor Max Taylor, one of the academics working for the COPINE project, stated: "The significance of this distinction is to emphasise the potential sexual qualities of a whole range of kinds of photographs (and other material as well) not all of which may meet obscenity criteria.
"[3] In the late 1990s, the COPINE project at the University College Cork, in cooperation with the Paedophile Unit of the London Metropolitan Police, developed a typology to categorize child abuse images for use in both research and law enforcement.
The 2002 case of Regina v Oliver in the Court of Appeal of England and Wales[6] established a scale by which indecent images of children could be "graded".