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.)

Userland-as-sender (in this case Dave Winer) said something about Conxion, using Conxion as the medium, and you and I were the recievers. By exerting pressure on Userland to change their message, Conxion tried to be both the medium and the sender (jointly with Userland). That is a breach of the new ethics, IMHO.

The obvious exception is "medium" and "reciever"... the one who owns the line can still browse what the senders are saying... but I don't think they get any special privileges, except what is necessary for administrative purposes only.

In the model of communication rights I've been developing in my head, there are three roles an entity can play: They can be the sender, the reciever, or the medium. That's not new; what is is that I think that you should never be more then one of them at a time, even though we have the increasing ability to do as time progresses.

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!