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Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.

So says a federal judge who struck down a law today that would have made it illegal for a commercial web site to let kids access "harmful" material. The 1998 Children Online Protection Act was Congress's second try at censoring the net after it failed to ban online porn altogether in 1996. The "harmful to minors" category even includes pictures of female breasts. If the court hadn't repeatedly suspended COPA since 1999, site owners could have gone to jail if kids even saw a pair of boobs. Of course, the law could only apply to U.S.-based commercial sites, so it wouldn't have done much good on the, um, world wide web. That's why (according to the blog Sexerati) plaintiffs who fought the law included online magazines Nerve and Salon, as well as a sex-education site. — NICK DOUGLAS