Comment by amiga386
3 months ago
> but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually making code available)?
I'll do you one better: 2600 Magazine was prohibited from saying which website hosted DRM-circumvention code:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v...
They were legally prohibited from saying, on their own website, words like "You can get DeCSS from http://lemuria.org/~tom/DeCSS/" and nothing else. Criminalised speech.
This is going to date me, but I had a t-shirt with basically a code-golf version of DeCSS printed on it and it said "This shirt is illegal" on it or something like that. I never actually wore it in public.
Oh, I definitely wore my Perl RSA "This shirt is a munition" T-shirt.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6283084
There's a site somewhere that has various ASCII art renditions of that code. It's on my project list to print some of those on some shirts :P
The USA has a lot of criminalised speech, despite the 1A. The most obvious historical example is "I am going to assassinate the president tomorrow at noon", but recently there have been a lot more things you can't say, such as "Fuck Donald Trump" which got someone arrested and deported.
One can have a visa revoked for any arbitrary reason, as they are a guest in the country and not a citizen.
But yes, obviously serious threats of violence are not protected speech.
The First Amendment applies to any person in the United States, not just citizens. Visas should not be able to be revoked for "any arbitrary reason".
The fact that your statement is becoming more and more true in the United States is an indictment.
Right, but as confirmed over and over and over again, non-citizens also have the right to 1st amendment, same as citizens.
5 replies →
I wouldn't be surprised if publishing circumvention code would be argued in court to be violence against earning money for political oriented books (spending money is a necessary and inseparable part of political communication).
1 reply →
Which would explain why foreign tourists to the US have been decreasing recently.
These two things aren't even remotely in the same category. Committing a crime, then documenting how you committed that crime and then publishing the instructions for others to repeat that crime with the clear intent to have others repeat that crime, has nothing to do with saying a bunch of words that you haven't even acted on.
Dispute that this should constitute a crime as much as you want (and please, do. Take it to court, get the laws changed, go into politics, get the US fixed, this is bullshit) but for as long as it is: being charged with a crime for "doing crime and teaching others to do the same crime" is not a first amendment violation.
There aren't many words in the first amendment, and none of them are "unless you're telling someone how to commit a crime"
The current regime (before it was a regime) got away with a lot of very bad speech because "the first amendment says all speech is allowed, no matter what" and should be made to hold everyone to the same standard they hold themselves to.
> I'll do you one better
I think this is a weaker example.
Which part of the text "You can get DeCSS from http://lemuria.org/~tom/DeCSS/" on a website constitutes distribution of "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof" ?
Judge Kaplan very likely went beyond what the law allows, in issuing the injunction against Eric Corley for even _adding a hyperlink_ to the DeCSS code on his website.
However, we don't know this for sure, because Corley did not take this to the Supreme Court. There is a chance that the SCOTUS would have accepted the case, and found that neither a hyperlink to computer source code, nor computer source code itself, constitutes "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof"... but at the same time, maybe they wouldn't accept it, and maybe they would but it'd cost a lot of money Corley didn't have to see the case through. So who knows? Corley seemed satisfied enough that, even though he was personally enjoined from linking to DeCSS, it nonetheless spread like wildfire all over the world, and DVDs were effectively copyable from that day forward.