You are protected in your speech from the government. Commercial law does and will still apply. Arbitrary company decisions happen all the time, and GitHub makes it clear that they won’t refrain from deleting repos for whatever reason.
But idk because i'm not a lawyer and we have copyright and ip laws so clearly congress can pass SOME laws that prohibit speech. Free speech absolutism is weird to me
However, this seems more like an issue of corporate policy than law.
Github needs to have some policy that ends up with them taking down repos that actually host illegal content, they don’t have any legal obligation to host files, so they can respond to takedown notices by just taking down the files. This wouldn’t be the government forcing them to take down files, it would be them deciding not to try and parse the law very closely. But this is different from having an area of law where the constitution doesn’t apply, and it bears repeating, because the constitution is really important and the idea that there should be some sort of cutout where it doesn’t apply is bad for society.
Something we should grapple with as a society is whether poorly written, ambiguous laws should be interpreted as the government taking action by essentially forcing companies into be over zealous in their corporate policy.
So? That’s not what the first amendment applies to. You do not have first amendment rights in civil cases. This is not “an idea”. It’s just how it is. See libel.
> So? That’s not what the first amendment applies to.
Yes it is.
> You do not have first amendment rights in civil cases.
Yes, you do; that’s why US defamation law is more limited than the common law it derives from, and where Fair Use as a judicial application of the First Amendment came from before it was codified in statute.
> See libel.
Libel is a perfect example of how you do have First Amendment rights in civil cases. Here's a long list of cases applying the First Amendment in the libel/defamation context:
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/encyclopedia/case/63/li...
You are actually very protected in documenting security flaws, and even republishing them.
I am unsure of who you think enforces laws... as far as I know OpenAI doesn't have their own police force yet.
They can sue you of course, but they generally can't demand compliance with takedowns in this case without first going to a judge and requesting a court order.
There is no "commercial law" unless you mean UCC.. which doesn't apply here.
Hint, that C letter is important!
In theory. In practice we see in the Twitter files, the new rule is that government agencies are free to send takedown requests to social media platforms for speech that disagrees with our (abhorrent) foreign policy.
Where in the Twitter files did it show that social media platforms would be punished with jail time or violence or anything if they refused to obey the government's orders?
Because unless you can demonstrate the government was putting a gun to Twitter's head and would not take no for an answer, that isn't a "new rule" it's literally just the government making a request. Which they and anyone else is and has always been allowed to do. And which social media platforms have sometimes refused without reprisal. I mean, I see speech that disagrees with American foreign policy all the time on social media. No one's being sent to the camps for it. It doesn't even get censored.
Not to mention that the requests constituted a gross 1st amendment violation.
IAAL and am unaware of any case law that holds that the mere act of requesting material be removed from publication is a First Amendment violation.
Do you have any case law to cite?
> GitHub makes it clear that they won’t refrain from deleting repos for whatever reason.
What actions or speech do you think Github has taken that makes that clear?
In general, I have seen Github stick to only taking things down according to the actual DMCA law, more than most companies that take things down pretty much whenever anyone asks them to.
Github has a DMCA Takedown Policy [1], that is better than most companies. Most companies policies -- if they even transparently publish them at all, which they often don't -- go well beyond what the DMCA requires in what they will take down. Compare to eg YouTube [2], which isn't really using a DMCA process at all, doesn't really have a transparent policy at all, and does not allow you to counter-notice. Github's policy is way better than most; but maybe there are occasions where they have been known not to follow their own policy, is that what you're saying?
From what I've seen, github has actually made it much more clear than most companies that they won't just randomly take things down for arbitrary reasons, but have a clear and transparent policy based on the DMCA. But maybe there are things I don't know.
In this particular case, though, someone else pointed out to me in another part of this thread -- it's not totally clear Github is even involved. From the text on the repo, it seems possible that OpenAI contacted the repo owner directly, and the repo owner decided to change the text of the repo README to say that, and that may all that has happened? If Github had actually done a "takedown" according to their usual procedures, I think the repo wouldn't be there anymore? But it's not really clear what's going on, or even what the repo owner _claims_ is going on, unless we have more info than appears in the linked repo README. It's not currently clear that Github is involved at all.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/content-removal-polic...
[2] https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-yo...
Github has deleted Iranian / Russian / etc. Repos before purely for political reasons. GitHub belongs to Microsoft, and Microsoft has a stake in OpenAI. Seems like a reason to me.
I don't like the US law much either, personally. I just don't consider a US corporation complying with US law to be a demonstration they will do arbitrary things for "any reason", it's sort of the default I expect from corporations and very predictable. If there's an example of a US corporation that chose to intentionally violate those sanction laws as an ethical stance, I'd love to find out more about that, and the outcome, too! I would imagine they would be penalized by the US government.
Microsoft was in fact recently so penalized [4], but I don't think it had anything to do with github, and I definitely don't think it was an ethical stance, just a mistake/profit-motivated one, or because these laws are a mess and hard to comply with. But I expect US corporations to try to comply with US laws, and don't consider doing so to be arbitrary or unpredictable "any reason".
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-starts-blocking-develop...
[2] https://github.blog/2019-09-12-global-software-collaboration...
[3] https://techweez.com/2022/04/18/github-suspending-accounts-r...
...is the government.
Yeah in all seriousness people trot out perceived constitutional infringements about 500x times more than it actually happens.