Since 1998, the Justice Department has been pushing an anti-pornography law that is so vague and technologically illiterate that support for it finally crumbled last week when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the department’s appeal. The law, the Child Online Protection Act, was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit last summer.

The law was so vague that many major newspapers signed on to a lawsuit against it because it could put their Web sites in jeopardy.

The law read:

Whoever knowingly and with knowledge of the character of the material, in interstate or foreign commerce by means of the World Wide Web, makes any communication for commercial purposes that is available to any minor and that includes any material that is harmful to minors shall be fined not more than $50,000, imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both.

The phrase “harmful to minors” was vague and left up to community interpretation with no standard for what might constitute a violation.

The New York Times, which was a party to the lawsuit, wrote on Monday: “Society has a legitimate interest in keeping sexually explicit material away from minors. But as the courts have repeatedly emphasized, it cannot be done through a sweeping censorship regime.”

The other problem with the law was it applied only to data sent from a server to a Web page. CNET’s Declan McCullagh pointed to the technological problems with the law:

Another reason for the erosion of support may be that because the law was written so long ago, it’s surprisingly limited. It applies only to material delivered “by means of the World Wide Web”–meaning that it doesn’t cover peer-to-peer file sharing, the Usenet newsgroups, … games like Virtual Hottie 2, those naughty things happening in Second Life, videos watched via a third-party iPhone application, or streaming porn viewed through the VideoLAN Client, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player desktop applications.