Nevermind that source code is suppose to be "human readable" material that is _translated_ into function instructions of machine code. A play is normally considered 'protected' free speech under US law, but what if robot was created which acted out the play and Gwin's argument was extended to apply the situtation where a play performed. Would the play itself no longer be a protected form of free speech, because it is seen as "functional" instructions to the robot actor? Would the playwrite become responsible for the robot's actions, such as killing a character/actor? As a programmer, I have "acted out" source code myself, as part of the debugging process. It is normally called "a walkthrough," so the difference between source code and a play is not as broad as some people may view it. I have followed the source code like a script, acting out the instructions like stage directions in a play. Does it matter who might 'read' the material, in regards to the protection of free speech? Whether it is written so that Russians or computers might be able to read it? If source code is written on a napkin, it can be currently exported, but what if tomorrow a vendor announces a 'napkin computer' which can directly read from napkins akin to a super-low densiy floppy disc. At 07:20 PM 7/6/98 -0700, Ernest Hua wrote:

Did anyone demonstrate the "functionalness" of any arbitrary language via a scanner and a compiler?

Why doesn't Gwin understand that the moment one successfully claims that a specific class of source code is not speech by the virtue of the fact that a compiler can transform it automatically into executable code which performs a function, then ANY speech of ANY sort is fundamentally vulnerable to being classified as functional as soon as a compiler can transform it into real machine code.

Ern

-----Original Message----- From: jkthomson [SMTP:jkthomson@bigfoot.com] Sent: Monday, July 06, 1998 7:12 PM

Reuters

3:40pm 6.Jul.98.PDT WASHINGTON -- A district court has dismissed a law professor's challenge to US regulations strictly limiting the export of computer data-scrambling technology.

Judge James Gwin ruled late Friday that the export limits, which prevented Case Western Reserve University Law School professor Peter Junger from posting the text of encryption programs on the Internet, did not violate the constitutional right to free speech.

The Ohio court's ruling contradicts a California district court ruling last August that said source code -- the instructions a person writes telling the computer what actions to perform -- constitutes a form of speech subject to First Amendment protection.

"Unlike instructions, a manual or a recipe, source code actually performs the function it describes," Gwin wrote. "While a recipe provides instructions to a cook, source code is a device, like embedded circuitry in a telephone, that actually does the function of encryption."