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ACME kitchen knives: great for chopping onions and murder sprees. Yes that is tongue-in-cheek but there is an equivalence here in that the consumer decides how

• wuest 14y ago
  > does that impinge on free-speech? It could be argued that free speech necessarily has limitations. Depending on where you are in the world, this involves hate speech and incitation to violence. I would readily agree that distributing (especially SELLING) tools with the expressly stated purpose of criminal use should be punishable. That being said, the same tools are likely useful for legitimate purposes. Heck, I could see an argument for Back Orifice being useful in that one would really like to be assured that their network's egress filtering would raise flags when BO traffic is on the wire. This brings up another important point--these tools are always useful for people who are writing protection and mitigation against the tools' methods.
• AnIrishDuck 14y ago
  Selling kitchen knives: not illegal. Selling kitchen knives, and giving tips and instruction on where to stab to inflict maximum damage: I'd be very surprised if you're not legally liable for the actions of the third party. But, IANAL. EDIT: as for free speech, the "imminent lawless action" [1] test is AFAIK the current standard in the US. I'm sure there's case law around this that I'm not familiar with, but I'd argue giving killing tips is likely to incite "imminent lawless action" in the knife analogy. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action