By ANNE GEARAN

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court partly upheld a law intended to shield
children from online pornography, but said on Monday that there are
unresolved free speech questions that prevent the law from taking effect
now.

The American Civil Liberties Union had challenged the law as
unconstitutional, claiming that in protecting children the Child Online
Protection Act also violates the rights of adults to see or buy what they
want on the Internet.

A divided Supreme Court said that the law's use of what it calls "community
standards" to define what is harmful to children does not by itself make the
law unconstitutional, as a lower federal appeals court ruled.

But the court went on to say that there are other potential constitutional
problems with the law that were not addressed by the lower court.

Without taking a position on those other potential problems, the high court
threw out the lower court's ruling and sent the case back for further
review.

The high court action means the 1998 law is still on hold, and the
government is barred from enforcing it.

The ruling is a partial victory for the Bush administration, but neither
side got what it really wanted.

The law, known as COPA, makes it a crime to knowingly place material deemed
harmful to children within their easy reach on the Internet. Violators may
be fined up to $50,000, and sentenced to six months in jail.

The law also requires adults to use access codes and or other ways of
registering before they could see objectionable material online.

The ACLU challenged the law on behalf of artists, sex therapists and others
who post legitimate, if risque, material on the World Wide Web.

Eight justices agreed that the case should be sent back to the 3rd U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals for a closer look, although they differed in their
reasons. Only Justice John Paul Stevens dissented.

"The scope of our decision today is quite limited," Justice Clarence Thomas
wrote for a five-member court majority. "We hold only that COPA's reliance
on community standards to identify 'material that is harmful to minors' does
not by itself render the statute substantially overbroad," in violation of
the First Amendment, Thomas wrote.

He pointedly said the court would take no position on the ACLU's claims that
the law is unconstitutionally broad and vague for reasons apart from
community standards.

"Prudence dictates allowing the court of appeals to first examine these
difficult issues," Thomas wrote.

Stevens said the appeals court acted correctly, and that the entire law
should be struck down as unconstitutional.

Although the court has previously used the concept of local community
standards to evaluate potentially offensive material, the same standard
cannot be applied to the global Internet, Stevens argued.

"In the context of the Internet ... community standards become a sword,
rather than a shield. If a prurient appeal is offensive in a Puritan
village, it may be a crime to post it on the World Wide Web," Stevens wrote.

The law was written as a replacement for a 1996 statute, the Communications
Decency Act, that the Supreme Court unanimously struck down as
unconstitutional in 1997.

Congress had admirable intentions in trying to help parents keep children
away from the growing volume of salacious and pornographic material online,
the court said then.

Where Congress went wrong, the court said, was in making the law so broad
that it covered pornographic material that adults have the right to see, as
well as nonpornographic sexual material.

Congress tried again a year later, and although the second attempt would
impose fewer restrictions, civil liberties groups challenged it on the same
First Amendment grounds the high court found persuasive before.

The case focused this time on how to reconcile the ways of the freewheeling
Internet with laws and court precedents from an era that assumed pornography
was a tangible thing, such as a girlie magazine that could be wrapped in
paper or hidden behind the store counter.

Material that is indecent but not obscene is protected by the First
Amendment. Adults may see or purchase it, but children may not. For the
owner of the corner store, it is relatively easy to sell to adults but not
to children. The inherent anonymity of the Internet, and the freedom of
movement it offers, make it difficult to offer adult material only to
adults.

In writing the 1998 law, Congress said "contemporary community standards"
should guide what is harmful to children. Civil liberties defenders said, as
Stevens did, that the standard would lead to the most prudish place in
America having veto power over the most liberal, because Internet material
is available to them both.

The ACLU also said the community standards idea would force legitimate
website operators to self-censor, for fear of running afoul of someone's
idea of what is inappropriate for children.

The Bush administration endorsed use of such a national standard.

The case is Ashcroft v. ACLU, 00-1293.