“It wasn’t a publicity stunt,” said Dart of the suit he filed in March to shut down the “erotic services” section of Craigslist, which he said catered to prostitution. “After two and a half years of contacting them with no response, I had no option left but to sue them,” he said,

Earlier this week, a Federal District Court Judge dismissed the suit. Judge John F. Grady ruled that the site couldn’t be held accountable for how people used it, because it is protected by the Communications Decency Act. Wrote the judge: “Intermediaries are not culpable for ‘aiding and abetting’ their customers who misuse their service to commit unlawful acts.”

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Apparently, COPA is not just an unsettling attempt of the few to define the values of the many, but an unconstitutional one as well.

“It is apparent that COPA, like the Communications Decency Act before it, ‘effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another,’ Reno, 521 U.S. at 874, 117 S.Ct. at 2346, and thus is overbroad,” the court wrote. “For this reason, COPA violates the First Amendment. These burdens would chill protected speech.”

That would seem to be the consensus. After all, this isn’t the first time this 1998 law has been ruled unconstitutional. Sadly, the DOJ is unconvinced. “We are disappointed that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Congressional statute designed to protect our children from exposure to sexually explicit material on the internet,” a DOJ representative said in a statement, indicating that it will likely appeal the decision.

Fourth time’s a charm, I guess.