Sigh. Choate on court decisions is like Ashcroft on civil liberties. Neither understands them. (Though I admit that Choate makes a common-sense point that does not, alas, jibe the rulings in the crypto cases.) -Declan On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 06:12:17PM -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, Arnold G. Reinhold wrote:
In the most recent ruling, Universal v. Remerdez/Eric Corley 2600.com (00-9185), http://cryptome.org/mpaa-v-2600-cad.htm , the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declined to overturn an injunction against the posting of DeCSS on the Internet. The Court held that software was speech, but did not enjoy the level of First Amendment protection accorded to pure speech because it is functional with little human intervention.
That's where 'press' comes into play. The 1st provides two protections. The first is to have an opinion and to express it, 'speech'. The second is 'press' which guarantees the right to share with other humans. Speech that is not shared, after all, is no better than speech not uttered. Now this explicitly protects the hardware and 'non-human' mechanisms that humans use to distribute their speech. The courts will eventually find that the sharing of speech, irrespective of mechanism, is protected. To deny an individual a mechanism to share their speech is in fact a violation of their speech. In addition the first does NOT draw ANY distinctions about what sorts of speech are or are not protected, it simply says 'speech' is protected.
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