Comment by mjburgess
5 years ago
There's plenty of "speech" criminalized in the US: many crimes are just matters of conspiring to X, or fradulently X... which may have been conducted entirely in speech.
The relevant kind of speech for "free expression" is that which seeks to express an idea/opinion/belief of the speaker.
That isn't criminalised in the UK as far as I'm aware, and would fall under the EHCR protections in any case which are in UK law as the human rights act.
You could even argue that Copyright law itself, and particularly the DMCA provisions, are a violation of free speech.
Obviously practically this wouldn't be possible, but if I were to write down all binary digits that my blu-ray of John Wick has, give it to a friend, and they wrote those digits down in their computer to watch the movie, that would be illegal for copyright violation.
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have copyright in any capacity (though I do think that US's model is especially draconian), just giving an example of a curtailment of free speech that isn't really controversial.
If you want to go all absolutist reductio ad absurdum, you would argue that even treason (in the form of divulging state secrets) is protected by free speech.