4 ms·
As far as I understand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States >the Ninth Circuit Cou
by Kristine1975 11y ago
As far as I understand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
>the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government's regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional
So at least the implementation of crypto in software seems to be protected under the First Amendment.
- sbarre 11y agoDidn't the MPAA/DeCSS case (that happened after this) just route around this whole precedent using the DMCA and still end up making that source code illegal to distribute or use? I remember some of the expert testimony presenting versions of the source code as all kinds of speech (someone even wrote a song I think) to make the point that code should be protected, but in the end they still lost the overall case. It's one thing to classify code as speech, it's another thing to give it complete protection from censorship or criminalization in any scenario.