James T. Woods Act

The Combating Online Predators Act of 2025, or COP Act of 2025, aims to strengthen federal protections against the sexual exploitation of minors by criminalizing specific threats. This legislation introduces new prohibitions against knowingly distributing, offering, sending, or providing a threat to distribute visual depictions of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct. The core intent behind these threats must be to compel the minor, or a person believed to be a minor, to create or transmit additional sexually explicit visual depictions. The bill achieves this by amending two key sections of Title 18, United States Code: Section 2252A, which addresses material involving the sexual exploitation of minors, and Section 2252, which pertains to material constituting or containing child pornography. These amendments broaden the scope of prosecutable offenses to include the act of threatening to distribute such illicit material.