Indecent material is also referred to as adult material or sexually explicit material."(Pember, 1999) This is a very vague description of the term "indecency," but so far, it has yet to be challenged in the Supreme Court. As District Judge, Dalzell said in his response to the CDA, "The definition of indecency, like the definition of obscenity, is not a rigid formula. Rather it confers a large degree of autonomy to individual communities to set the bounds of decency for themselves."(Dalzell, 1998).

             The term "obscenity" also seems to attract attention in today"s legal system. The definition of "obscenity" was agreed upon by a majority of the Supreme Court after the case Miller v. California in 1973. Chief Justice Warren Burger set the following standards for defining obscenity: "1) An average person, applying contemporary local community standards, finds that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest. 2) The work depicts in a patently offensive way sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law. 3) The work in question lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value."(Dalzell, 1998) Before the CDA, the law protected indecent speech, but not obscene speech. The Telecommunications Act was passed in 1996, but Section 5, otherwise known as the CDA, was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU, not because it presented high barriers to entry for minors, but because it presented those same barriers to adults, thus infringing on their constitutional right to view indecent material. .

             Soon after the CDA was declared unconstitutional, Congress made another attempt to attack indecency on the internet by passing what was called The Child Online Protection Act or as it was so aptly named, "CDA 2". The purpose of COPA was the same as the original CDA, but it applied to commercial sites on the Internet.