Comment by brookst
16 hours ago
How about copyright infringement, false advertising, sharing classified documents, tobacco advertising? There are a LOT of special cases.
Maybe there shouldn’t be and all of those things should be free from government interference, but the status quo is that plenty of speech is regulated.
Copyright enforcement is not a form of censorship.
So basically controls on speech that are good are not censorship and therefore good, but ones that are bad are censorship and therefore bad? That doesn’t feel like an especially defensible view.
Copyright violation is not speech.
Copying someone else's work and presenting it as your own is not protected speech, it is fraud. If you want to still consider this speech, someone is using it to actively and intentionally harm others.
If you're so intent on free speech, how would you feel if someone followed you around screaming profanities and abuse? Are you engaging in harmful and immoral censorship by calling the cops to remove this person? Are you suppressing his right to free speech by taking out a restraining order?
It most certainly is abused that way. See every garbage DMCA takedown request submitted by scumbag corporation du juor.
This doesn't even take into account the endless lobbying by Disney to pervert copyright law into what it is today.