>While I agree with you about the use of NOFILTER (except I always use READWRITE) I don't think it's relevant to Yossi's problem. If the COPY TO didn't respect the filter condition (although, as Tore says, I expect that it always should) wouldn't the result be the entire source table, not just the filtered records?

It does respect the filter and only filtered result will be copied. I guess my comment was more of a good practice. I do not see a reason for not always using NOFILTER.