COPA vs. COPPA and the U.S. Supreme Court

- January 29th, 2009 by Steven Leung

If you read just the headlines, you might get confused into accidentally breaking the law on your corporate website.  The Superme Court of the United States refused to hear an appeal on the lower court ruling that the Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA) is unconstitutional.

According to the PBS article by attorney and law professor Jeffrey Neuberger, COPA was created because Congress feared “the prospect of children obtaining access to obscene and indecent material on the Internet”.  This 1998 law was a follow up to the Communication Decency Act of 1996 which had been previously ruled unconstitutional.

Unfortunately, his article is titled U.S. Supreme Court (Finally) Kills Online Age Verification Law.  Frequently, the authors don’t write their article titles — editors do.  So there is no blame being assigned here.  But the fact is that a casual reader could easily confuse COPA with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which does require age verification and was also enacted in 1998.

A 2007 FTC press release goes on to note that “there is potential for age falsification on general audience websites, as well as liability under COPPA, should these sites obtain actual knowledge that they are collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children online.”

The FTC also publishes a COPPA FAQ which has information about specific scenarios corporate website and social media operators should be aware of.

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