The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on Tuesday affirmed [decision, PDF] a lower court's decision granting a permanent injunction against enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a federal law that imposes civil and criminal penalties on website operators for making sexually explicit materials available to minors over the Internet. The Act also requires adult websites to verify viewer age with a credit card number or any other reasonable method of age verification. The court stated that "because COPA is a content-based restriction on protected speech, it is presumptively invalid and the Government bears the burden of showing its constitutionality."