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Freedom of expression. We humans have created all kinds of things that get misused. The Nobel prizes were set up exactly because people were blaming Nobel for
by BlackFly 8y ago
Freedom of expression.
We humans have created all kinds of things that get misused. The Nobel prizes were set up exactly because people were blaming Nobel for the violent use of dynamite. Let us not further hobble the spreading of ideas with political concerns about which ideas are dangerous. Blame the (mis)user, not the manufacturer and certainly not the discoverer.
- hjk05 8y agoDistributing software that is intended to steal money from people is not freedom of speech.
- BlackFly 8y agoOf course it is freedom of speech. The only thing that was distributed was text: an encoding of an idea. The act of using that idea to build something to defraud someone is the criminal act. Jurisdictions censor all kinds of speech, and maybe you think this kind of speech should be censored, but at least in the USA you would have to argue incitement which is a stretch. The historical example was the publishing of the PGP source code in book form to distribute it. You might consider the software to be "military grade arms" but describing to someone how to build it is just an idea. Certainly the US government might want to reign in this interpretation and might love to create a new exception, but there is no intrinsic reason for a rational individual to insist upon that interpretation.