<P> It further criminalized the transmission of materials that were "obscene or indecent" to persons known to be under 18 . </P> <P> Free speech advocates, however, worked diligently and successfully to overturn the portion relating to indecent, but not obscene, speech . They argued that speech protected under the First Amendment, such as printed novels or the use of the seven dirty words, would suddenly become unlawful when posted to the Internet . Critics also claimed the bill would have a chilling effect on the availability of medical information . Online civil liberties organizations arranged protests against the bill, for example, the Black World Wide Web protest which encouraged webmasters to make their sites' backgrounds black for 48 hours after its passage, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign . </P> <P> 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 .) </P> <P> In 2003, Congress amended the CDA to remove the indecency provisions struck down in Reno v. ACLU . A separate challenge to the provisions governing obscenity, known as Nitke v. Gonzales, was rejected by a federal court in New York in 2005 . The Supreme Court summarily affirmed that decision in 2006 . </P>

The communications decency act of 1996 was overturned after a year because
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