the communications decency act of 1996 was overturned after a year because
Communications Decency Act In Philadelphia on June 12, 1996, a panel of federal judges blocked part of the CDA, saying it would infringe upon the free speech rights of adults. The next month, another US federal court in New York struck down the portion of the CDA intended to protect children from indecent speech as too broad. On June 26, 1997, the Supreme Court upheld the Philadelphia court's decision in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, stating that the indecency provisions were an unconstitutional abridgement of the First Amendment right to free speech because they did not permit parents to decide for themselves what material was acceptable for their children, extended to non-commercial speech, and did not carefully define the words "indecent" and "offensive." (The New York case, Reno v. Shea, was affirmed by the Supreme Court the next day, without a published opinion.)