WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 yesterday to again block Congress' efforts to protect children from Internet pornography, ruling that the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 would unnecessarily prevent adults from seeing online material that is constitutionally protected.

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The justices upheld a lower court's injunction against the law, which Congress enacted after the Supreme Court had invalidated an earlier and even broader law known as the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

COPA would impose fines and jail terms on commercial pornographers who post sexually explicit material "harmful to minors" on the Web. Pornographers could avoid prosecution by showing that they took serious steps to shield children, such as demanding that customers use a credit card.

"Content-based prohibitions, enforced by severe criminal penalties, have the constant potential to be a repressive force in the lives of a free people," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion. "To guard against that threat, the Constitution demands that content-based restrictions on speech be presumed invalid and that the government bear the burden of showing their constitutionality."

The court did not declare COPA unconstitutional. Rather, the justices sent the case back to a lower court in Philadelphia with instructions to make sure that the penalties the law imposes on pornographers are the "least restrictive" way to protect children without violating the First Amendment rights of adults.

That might prove difficult given the language of Kennedy's opinion.

After noting that requiring the use of Internet "filters" that block children from seeing certain material would be less restrictive than COPA, Kennedy went on to suggest that "filters also may be more effective than COPA" because they could block pornography in emails as well as on the Web. Kennedy also suggested the lower court examine the law in light of recent advances in computer filters and other technology.

Kennedy was joined in the majority opinion by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas. Dissenting were Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Stephen Breyer, Antonin Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor.

In an opinion joined by Rehnquist and O'Connor, Breyer said COPA "risks imposition of only minor burdens on protected material -- burdens that adults wishing to view the material may overcome at modest cost."

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Disagreeing with Kennedy's suggestion that filtering software was a better way to protect children, Breyer said such software is imprecise, costly and of no help to parents who are not in a position to monitor their children's computer use.

Echoing comments he made at oral arguments in March, Breyer suggested the majority was determined to reject even the most carefully drawn statute aimed at online pornography. "If this statute does not pass the court's less restrictive' alternative test, what does?" Breyer asked.

"If nothing does, then the court should say so clearly."

Arthur Hellman, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, said that Breyer, a former congressional aide, was giving voice to the frustration of members of Congress, who have been under pressure from their constituents to do something about children's access to indecency on the Internet.

"This was a really good-faith effort to meet the demands of the first case and now the court tells them it is not good enough," Hellman said, "Congress is going to feel frustrated that they met the court more than halfway by narrowing some definitions and the court still ruled against them."

Predictably, yesterday's decision was praised by civil-liberties groups and condemned by the Bush administration and social conservatives.

ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson, who argued against the law in the high court, said the ruling "demonstrates that there are many less restrictive ways to protect children without sacrificing communication intended for adults."

But Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo deplored the decision, saying, "Congress has repeatedly attempted to address this serious need and the court yet again opposed these common-sense measures to protect America's children."

Pat Trueman, senior legal adviser for the Family Research Council, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of COPA, called the ruling "yet another victory at the high court for pornographers at the expense of America's children." Trueman also expressed particular disappointment "that Justice Clarence Thomas was on the wrong side of the decision."

Thomas was in the majority in 2002 when the court ruled on a different legal challenge to COPA, finding that the law's definition of "community standards" for judging indecency was not too broad for a worldwide communications medium.