600
Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment
predecessor was so broad in part because it had no such limitation. 521 U. S., at 877. COPA, by contrast, covers a speaker only if:
"the person who makes a communication or offers to make a communication, by means of the World Wide Web, that includes any material that is harmful to minors, devotes time, attention, or labor to such activities, as a regular course of such person's trade or business, with the objective of earning a profit as a result of such activities (although it is not necessary that the person make a profit or that the making or offering to make such communications be the person's sole or principal business or source of income)." 47 U. S. C. § 231(e)(2)(B).
So COPA is narrower across this dimension than its predecessor; but how much narrower is a matter of debate. In the District Court, the Attorney General contended that the Act applied only to professional panderers, but the court rejected that contention, finding "nothing in the text of the COPA . . . that limits its applicability to so-called commercial pornographers only." 31 F. Supp. 2d, at 480. Indeed, the plain text of the Act does not limit its scope to pornography that is offered for sale; it seems to apply even to speech provided for free, so long as the speaker merely hopes to profit as an indirect result. The statute might be susceptible of some limiting construction here, but again the Court of Appeals did not address itself to this question. The answer affects the breadth of the Act and hence the significance of any variation in community standards.
Likewise, it is essential to answer the vexing question of what it means to evaluate Internet material "as a whole," 47 U. S. C. §§ 231(e)(6)(A), (C), when everything on the Web is connected to everything else. As a general matter, "[t]he artistic merit of a work does not depend on the presence of a single explicit scene. . . . [T]he First Amendment requires
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