This principle extends a lot farther then this, but I think it explains things reasonably well. At least to me.

On this topic, while Userland hosts sites, such as this one, Userland is acting as a medium, and occasionly as a receiver. They have no right to exert pressure on me as a sender. (Note that I "signed away" some rights when I accepted the user's agreement; this is fair. There are already laws and precedents on the book for contracts that attempt to make you sign away excessive rights, so we can consider that issue as an already-solved one.)

I think the most distrubing thing is how readily the courts throw these arguments out as soon somebody with lots of money is involved. In a conflict between the laws concerning theft of intellectual property and the exercise of free speech... free speech wins, no matter how much it may cost some company, because free speech is constitutionally guaranteed and IP is not.

---

First Amendment lawyers take on DVD cracking case: "'The battleground over the First Amendment is now in cyberspace,' Jim Wheaton, senior counsel for nonprofit, public-interest law firm the First Amendment Project, said in a statement. 'Old media is lumbering into the new era and wants to knock down our civil liberties in a clumsy attempt to maintain the old paradigm.'"

Now, this 'proves' nothing... law is what the courts say it is. But I think this is a valuable example of a clear inability of the current system to deal with the conditions brought on by the Information Revolution. You can't just wrap the current system around this contradiction... patent law and copyright law are immiscible. It's not going to work. We need to step back and re-analyze the problems from the original principles, I think.

Patent law covers machines and processes. Copyright law covers particular expressions. If code is protected by the First Amendment, then it is clearly an expression. Yet the Patent Office issues patents on code, by which I mean that a particular code expression can be found in violation of a patent. AFAIK, there is nothing that is covered under both systems, which is a good thing; they are not terribly compatible!

Consider: We have two major structures in this country for dealing with intellectual property, and they are fairly clearly defined and do not overlap. One is patent law, and one is copyright law.

The Wired story puts a spin on the story as a victory for privacy advocates (and of course the professor involved in the lawsuit), but I'd like to look at this from another point of view.

Because computer source code is an expressive means for the exchange of information and ideas about computer programming, we hold that it is protected by the First Amendment.

A very interesting court opinion here... in the case of Junger v. Daley, the court has issued some stunning pronouncements!