David Touretzky Interview

tklancer writes: "Salon has an interview with David Touretzky (the CMU professor who was kind enough to point out to Judge Kaplan that code is speech during the DeCSS trial). He talks about the court decision and several ongoing free speech battles."

Comments

Touretzky Syndrome

[fluxrad]

I think Mr. Touretzky has some interesting points. The most important of which is the Amphetamine Anti-Proliferation act.

Whether you're for or against drugs, you have to recognize that the government is starting to over-step it's bounds where freedom of speech is concerned. It's become sort of a "well, we're all for freedom of speech, just not this type of speech" type of thing

There are serious issues here. We cannot allow agencies, or people, or organizations, or judges to out-law some form of speech simply because it is distasteful or even slightly dangerous (in the non-physical form: excluding libel and slander, which are crimes that are alot harder to commit than one would think). This is exactly the type of thing we must prevent in order to secure our more "traditional" freedoms.

I won't go so far to say that code is definitely a form of speech. Personally, i feel that falls under reverse-engineering arguments. But if it's concievable that the government can take away our right to express ourselves in any way, simply because it's unpopular - then they're one step closer to taking away everything else.


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