Parts of the earlier and much broader Communications Decency Act had been struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1997 (Reno v. ACLU[3]); COPA was a direct response to that decision, narrowing the range of material covered.

[4] In 1999, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld the injunction and struck down the law, ruling that it was too broad in using "community standards" as part of the definition of harmful materials.

[7] On June 29, 2004, in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union (2004),[8] the Supreme Court upheld the injunction on enforcement, ruling that the law was likely to be unconstitutional.

Notably, the court mentioned that "filtering’s superiority to COPA is confirmed by the explicit findings of the Commission on Child Online Protection, which Congress created to evaluate the relative merits of different means of restricting minors' ability to gain access to harmful materials on the internet."

Given the rapid pace of internet development, government officials thought these two laws might be sufficient to restrict access by minors to specific material.

[10] In addition to the plaintiffs ACLU et al., several witnesses testified in defense of First Amendment rights on the Internet, including the director of the Erotic Authors Association, Marilyn Jaye Lewis.