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Comment by mpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Does the first amendment guarantee the freedom to profit from speech?

I think a law preventing you from profiting from speech on the basis of the content would still be a constitutional issue. E.g., a law saying you can distribute pornography but can’t sell it for a profit would be unconstitutional.

“You don’t have a right to profit from speech” would be a convenient pretext to, for instance, shut down the New York Times.

Makes sense. I was coming at it from a taxation perspective rather than the "we're shutting you down" angle. We tax plenty of things that have societal harm - cigarettes, alcohol, etc. Speech is definitely too slippery a concept though.

But what about reach? Could we theoretically tax businesses based on the volume of people their content reaches, thus bringing in public revenue and/or disincentivizing:

- virality for the sake of ad impressions

- too-large (social) media networks

I'm sure it'd be phenomenally difficult to measure, but easier to pin down than arbitrary speech.

I don’t know enough to say confidently.

Personally, I’d be suspicious of a rule like that. In the end, it has to be enforced by the executive and it sounds a lot like “all speech will be tolerated except speech that spreads widely enough to be a threat to existing power.”

That sounds suspiciously like an Internet tax. Congress already passed a law banning such taxes.

I don't believe that it does.

However, I do think that knowingly lying to obtain something of value is in many instances fraud.

I am not a lawyer.

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