[free-sklyarov] legal precedent for code as free speech?

Michael D. Crawford crawford at goingware.com
Sat Jul 21 11:06:19 PDT 2001


I believe there have been a couple of court judgements which ruled that computer
program source code is free speech.  This has not yet been tested in the supreme
court, and of course Judge Kaplan ruled that it wasn't in the DeCSS case.

Can anyone tell me where I can find the specific legal opinions about this on
the web?  I'm going to write to my congressional representatives and want to
cite these cases as background.  I think it is helpful to give specific, legal
information a congressperson can work with, as they're probably going to find a
letter about freeing russian programmers kind of out of the blue.

One of the cases is the Daniel Bernstein case on encryption export.  I believe
the appeals court found that source code was free speech, although I'm not sure
they said that directly - I do know they found his free speech rights were
infringed.

I'm pretty sure there has been one other case, although I don't know if it has
made it to the appellate level.  But it's been a while and I don't remember
which case this was.

When I write the letters I will post one on my web page someone and send the URL
here so you can use them to write your own representatives if you like.

Mike
-- 
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford at goingware.com

  Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.




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