The problem with this law is that anything that would be inappropriate for a four year old would require age verification such as a credit card. Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body would be deemed inappropriate for web publishing without some way to verify the person wanting the information was over 18.

Criminal penalties were part of the package as well. The law also applied to bloggers and covered ads on their pages.

So, you’re blogging on women’s health in the US and some unsupervised 10 year old enters a false birthday (since you didn’t use verifiable information such as a credit card, a key element in the COPA) finds something on your site and/or they see an ad with ”inappropriate” content automatically generated by Google or Yahoo based on the content on your site and ta-da! You are criminally liable.

If the law had just required people to collect birthdays, I don’t think it would have been as much of an issue. In effect it required anyone wanting material not appropriate to society’s standards for a 4 year old to ”out” themselves to access that material.