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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

We spent a lot of years with export controls on a lot of things, and continue to have them on many pieces of software. Trying to do legal jujitsu to say “the code is speech”, especially given SCOTUSs current makeup, and the context of this being components of literal weapons systems… you’re not gonna get far IMO

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This doesn't hold up if the software is baked into things that are undoubtedly protected by the 1st Amendment. What's going to happen if a music album uses ITAR technology?

How is a music album free speechier than a github repo?

Music has always been protected from the beginning of the Constitution and there have been zero (0) efforts to prevent its protection, while online code repos have only existed for about 30 years and don't have that same cachet yet.

> Music has always been protected from the beginning of the Constitution and there have been zero (0) efforts to prevent its protection

Tipper Gore?

The music labels never actually got rid of anything in a technical sense, only added information in the form of a sticker.

This is a strange legal take. There is nothing about music that makes it special in the eyes of the law, it is speech like any other, subject to the same protections and restrictions as publishing a book. If you release an album containing nuclear secrets on Spotify, an injunction, removal and arrest will follow.

We don't actually know that this is true, because if you don't take the law literally like a lot of coders do, then that scenario isn't known to be possible because the format is a more explicit from of protected speech

The opposite is true. Constitutions ( plural ) protect the access to, and therefore the production. This to the point that "protections" that don't contribute to primairily the access and secundairily to the production thereof could be deemed unconstitutional.

That just means it's covered by both the first and second amendments.

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