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Comment by sightbroke | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...

"Attached to the core rights of free speech and free press are several peripheral rights that make these core rights more secure. The peripheral rights encompass not only freedom of association, including privacy in one's associations, but also, in the words of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), "the freedom of the entire university community", i.e., the right to distribute, the right to receive, and the right to read, as well as freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, and freedom to teach.[144]"

"The United States Constitution protects, according to the Supreme Court in Stanley v. Georgia (1969), the right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, and to be generally free from governmental intrusions into one's privacy and control of one's thoughts.[145]"

"As stated by the Court in Stanley: 'If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.'[146]"

[144] - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/381/479/

[145], [146] - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/557/

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The US Constitution grants congress the power to give authors and inventors time-limited exclusive rights to their works/discoveries (Art1.S8.C8). This moots the 1st amendment argument.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...

I don't think that authors having exclusive rights to their works necessarily implies that someone else _receiving_ them is legally culpable though. My admittedly naive thinking is that someone distributing something illegally doesn't necessarily imply that the receiver is also committing crime. If Robin Hood steals a fancy 4K TV from the mansion downtown and gives it to his neighbor as a birthday gift, would the neighbor be guilty of a crime as well? Does the answer change if Robin Hood were instead the owner of the mansion next door (who could plausibly be the owner of the TV) and gives it to his less wealthy childhood friend?

I'm not saying that either of these situations are directly analogous to the distribution of copyrighted works (since among other things, I don't think there's any way to buy a TV without being able to freely give it to someone else), but that it's not immediately obvious to me that the illegality in distribution has to be symmetric, and that there might be a coherent legal argument that people having the right to _receive_ information isn't inconsistent with the only people with the right to transmit it refusing to allow it. The part of the Constitution (edit: Supreme Court opinion; not actually the Constitution itself) quoted above doesn't seem to say anything about the right to share anything, just to receive it.

If Robin Hood sees a nice painting hanging in the castle, then commands a genie to create an exact brush-stroke-by-brush-stroke replica that is identical to the original in every way, then gives the replica to his neighbor as a birthday gift, has any crime even occurred?

In this situation, the noble does not own the painting, so much as they possess it and have only been granted a license to privately view it, not a license to show it to others, and further license only to reproduce it for their own personal archival purposes - Robin Hood did not have license to view the painting, and the genie did not have license to reproduce it

but now that the reproduction exists, does it carry the same license with it, and should the neighbor be held responsible for the original violation of the license, when all they’ve done is receive an illegally produced copy?

Should the owner if the original painting be held responsible for failing to prevent it from being illegally viewed and copied?

>In this situation, the noble does not own the painting, so much as they possess it and have only been granted a license to privately view it, not a license to show it to others, and further license only to reproduce it for their own personal archival purposes

What is the point of making such an "analogy"? Might as well say the noble has a copy of Die Hard in their DVD collection.

> an exact brush-stroke-by-brush-stroke replica that is identical to the original in every way

Yes, forgery is a crime in many jurisdictions, and in some it does not matter whether or not you are transparent about it being such -- specifically for copyright/trademark reasons.

Forgery would require trying to pass off the copy as an original. As long as it is not pretending to be something it isn't, it is just a replica, not a forgery.

Thsis was my impression at first too, but legal experts in my jurisdiction have taught me they're not always so cleanly separable.

Without taking a stand on whether this _should_ be illegal or not, but whether it _is_, I could imagine that a legal system might want to give the painter a way to get income for a limited time by distributing copies of the painting, and that copying it in this way would infringe upon those rights. In this case though, I'd argue that the modern analogue of this would be Robin Hood getting invited over to watch a movie with the noble (which would be allowed!) and then secretly burning a copy of the DVD when the noble went to the bathroom. Our current legal system doesn't consider "I didn't know what I was doing was illegal" to be a valid defense, so Robin Hood would still be committing a crime by sharing the DVD further after he's copied it. (Since we don't have genies in real life, I don't know how the law would consider them culpable, but based on my very limited knowledge of genie lore, my guess is that the amount of free will they have in this situation is about the same as the DVD burner, so they probably would be okay from the perspective of the law?)

Interestingly, I think that the more direct analog to what we have today would be if the noble themself had the genie copy the painting and gift it to their friend Robin Hood. I do think the same logic I gave above ultimately applies to whether our current legal system would allow the artist to enforce exclusivity, but I find it a lot more compelling as an argument about whether it _should_ be allowed or not compared to the hypothetical you gave. In your version of it, it doesn't feel like allowing what Robin Hood did is particularly beneficial to society, but in the version where the noble is an enthusiastic participant in the copying, it seems a lot more like outlawing it would lead to some harmful dynamics (like you mention about whether the noble bears responsibility for protecting access to the painting based on obtaining it). In other words, having a system where the artist is allowed to enforce his exclusive distribution rights universally actually seems _less_ problematic to me at first glance than one that only applies to those who sign an agreement when purchasing the paintings.

To put this in terms of torrenting, my naive understanding is that right now, it's definitively considered illegal to seed protected content, and the question is whether it's legal to download it without seeding or not. I actually think that it would be worse to allowing downloading without allowing seeding as well, so the system that Meta is arguing for would be worse than if what they did is also illegal. However, I'm honestly not sure if they're actually right or not about what the law says, and that's why I brought up the hypotheticals I did. I also honestly don't feel confident in my feelings on whether I'd prefer to ban both seeding and downloading protected content or to eliminate the legal protections entirely and allow both, but it doesn't seem like that's actually the legal question at the heart of the current matter.

your TV example is a bad example for discussions around copyright — how does one copy a TV?

a more pertinent example to the main topic at hand

i download a file onto my PC. in doing so i have made a copy of that file onto my PC.

if that file is a copyrighted work, e.g. a musical work, i have reproduced the work by downloading it. i have copied it. streaming music is covered by copyright for the same reason - a copy is transferred onto your device because you clicked on a button. the act of copying, or reproducing, the work is the bit that matters.

the distributor (spotify/apple) just gave me access to their original copy to make my own, new, copy. distribution is covered, but slightly different as it is facilitating others to infringe copyright (if i’m pirating music).

in your TV example, a closer idea would be if i 3D printed a new TV based on a patented design. probably not allowed to do it (i don’t know patent law) but who’s gonna enforce it? no one knows about it.

if i start selling my 3D printed TVs, well, i should probably get a lawyer sharpish.

—

also, isn’t knowingly receiving stolen goods a crime? so receiver of the TV in your example could be charged with a crime if it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt that they knew it was stolen?

> i download a file onto my PC. in doing so i have made a copy of that file onto my PC.

It's even deeper than that. Legally, you are also making a copy when you load the file into RAM to play it.

But you're not making a copy when your eyes focus the image on your retina?

Shh, don't give them ideas

> If Robin Hood steals a fancy 4K TV from the mansion downtown and gives it to his neighbor as a birthday gift, would the neighbor be guilty of a crime as well?

In this specific example, probably yes.

> Does the answer change if Robin Hood were instead the owner of the mansion next door

Yes, it does. The main problem here is that Robin Hood is well known to obtain everything he has in the world by stealing it.

Once you tell someone a secret, you need to be prepared to beat them up if they share it. — dad, 1996

This gives you the right “to beat them up” but not the right to learn a secret. You can take a patent and build that thing in your house. The government can’t stop you, neither the inventor. It’s when you try to sell it that they can come after you.

>...You can take a patent and build that thing in your house. The government can’t stop you, neither the inventor. It’s when you try to sell it that they can come after you.

I don't think that is correct. The patent act states:

>...Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.

https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-35-patents/35-usc-sect-27...

Note where it says "makes, uses". In practice, it is highly unlikely that someone would know about the infringement if it was just done for personal use, but that doesn't mean it isn't infringement.

> I don't think that is correct.

It is. It's often called the "research exemption." You literally can only get into any kind of trouble when your intentions are commercial.

As a general defense, the research exemption is only applicable where you can reasonably claim you are using a patented invention for research purposes. But if it looks like the reason you are infringing on the patent is that you want to use the patent, but don't want to pay for the rights, that is not going to work. Even if your intentions are not commercial, making or using a patented invention is still infringement. Like I said before, it is highly unlikely that someone would know about the infringement if it was just done for personal use, but that doesn't mean it isn't infringement.

I don't think it'd hold up, but one could argue that the first amendment was an amendment, and thus changed the constitution, and therefore removed that ability of congress.

The amendments protect the rights as they existed at the time the amendment was passed. I.e. how would the plain text of the text be interpreted by a reasonable person in 1791. E.g., re 2nd, what did militia mean?

Thus, the 1A locks in speech rights as they existed in 1791. Because there was no right to slander, or threaten, or commit treason, or "share" in 1791, Congress retained the power to regulate.

>Because there was no right to slander, or threaten, or commit treason, or "share" in 1791, Congress retained the power to regulate.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and intentions of the constitution. Slander and fighting words are exceptions to the first amendment that were determined through the legislative process.

Essentially the entire US constitution is negative rights - the right to X when X means government NOT doing something. Right to freedom of movement, right to freedom of religion, right to freedom of speech, right to privacy - these are restrictions on government to protect the liberties of the people. And then you come to the tenth amendment -

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

It seems abundantly clear from even a cursory analysis that the founders explicitly designed the constitution to limit and restrict the power of a centralized federal government, as treasonous, violent disregard for a powerful centralized federal government is quite literally the premiere founding principle baked into the US's history.

Congress has zero power whatsoever whenever they lack the consent of the goverened. The functional legitimacy of the entire federal government is near zero - we're living in the orwellian nightmare where the military industrial complex more or less runs the entire show from behind the scenes - something Eisenhower tried to warn us about over half a century ago.

> Slander and fighting words are exceptions to the first amendment that were determined through the legislative process.

The legislative process can't make exceptions to constitutional provisions. These were recognized as not covered by first amendment protections by jurisprudence, not legislation.

Yep, totally meant "judicial" not "legislative" here, my bad. My brain's word:meaning hashmap had a short circuit there, thank you for correcting!

>It seems abundantly clear from even a cursory analysis that the founders explicitly designed the constitution to limit and restrict the power of a centralized federal government, as treasonous, violent disregard for a powerful centralized federal government is quite literally the premiere founding principle baked into the US's history.

Which is why we immediately replaced a loose federation of Strong States with a new government built around an explicitly empowered and strengthened federal government?

The idea that the constitution was built around a very weak federal government is wrong. The founders built a weak federal government, immediately ran into problems with it, and immediately those same founders built a new government with a strong federal government with EXPLICIT and CLEAR authority and supremacy over the states on certain things.

For example, modern conservatives often decry how the federal supremacy on interstate commerce is used to regulate interstate commerce, but the commerce clause was built to tear down all possible protectionism and trade barriers states had erected amount themselves. The strong federal government was also built explicitly to be a single strong bloc for trade negotiations.

There were plenty of anti-federalists around during this time. They got to air their complaints and opinions. Nobody listened to them because the articles of confederation, and the loose, weak federal government it built was just that useless and broken. The founders literally tore up the government to make a new one without the authorization to do so because there was no stability, no long term hope for the existing one.

>...There were plenty of anti-federalists around during this time. They got to air their complaints and opinions. Nobody listened to them because the articles of confederation, and the loose, weak federal government it built was just that useless and broken.

Nobody listened to them? I think most historians would agree that they were instrumental in getting the bill of rights added to the constitution. For example:

>...Anti-Federalists in Massachusetts, Virginia and New York, three crucial states, made ratification of the Constitution contingent on a Bill of Rights. In Massachusetts, arguments between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists erupted in a physical brawl between Elbridge Gerry and Francis Dana. Sensing that Anti-Federalist sentiment would sink ratification efforts, James Madison reluctantly agreed to draft a list of rights that the new federal government could not encroach.

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-anti-federalists-and...

"In interpreting this text, we are guided by the principle that “[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.” United States v. Sprague, 282 U. S. 716, 731 (1931) ; see also Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, 188 (1824). Normal meaning may of course include an idiomatic meaning, but it excludes secret or technical meanings that would not have been known to ordinary citizens in the founding generation." District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008).

Interpreted as an ordinary voter would have interpreted it.

That's certainly one interpretation. Your parents also has an interpretation. It will be interesting to see what the courts decide.

It doesn't moot the argument just makes it slightly more complicated. Not only is current copryight very far from what a normal human would understand as a limited time but that is not the only restriction there - this power is also given with a specific purpose that current copyright does not effectively serve.

How can a provision in the base text of the constitution take precedence over an amendment?

I am not convinced that applies to receiving information.

A bit off-topic, but I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship but are perfectly OK with advertising and other forms of propaganda (from social media editorializing, bought newspapers...), that arguably do much more to "control men's minds" than censorship ever would.

It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).

> I always thought it was "funny" how americans are so opposed to censorship

Not sure you can make this blanket statement about “Americans” any more. It seems like an increasing number are fine with censorship when they aren’t the ones being censored.

Yes, for many this "free speech absolutism" is just a rhetorical stance they adopt, which do not reflect their actions at all.

American here. We're an incredibly large and incredibly diverse country. This generaliization doesn't really work.

I know, I have friends and family in America. It was just a fun thought I had in my head for a while. I should have added a "Some americans..." in my comment. Sorry for the blanket statement.

It's very simple, Americans believe that the individual is responsible for themselves while most of the rest of the world wants to be "protected" by a restrictive government. One leads to innovation and one stifles it. We would rather be responsible for discovering the truth on our own, than trust a central authority to decide what is and isn't true(or propaganda). I find it funny how Europeans think their governments are protecting them from propaganda instead of drowning them in propaganda.

Heh. This is not the month to be making that argument.

I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.

I honestly believe we'd be better off with informational hygiene standards, too. The last two decades have taught me this lesson - free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society, and when you find a security hole that big, you patch it.

I recognize there's a balance to be found, and reasonable people will disagree on where the tipping point is.

>free speech absolutism is a giant "kick me" sign on the back of society

How does this work? What danger represents freedom of speech? With lack of it dangers is understandable: it is a giant "welcome" sign for bloody totalitarian dictatorship.

If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you (which is one of the things that free speech absolutists generally argue for), then you will have no way of knowing if what you buy is going to kill you.

I don't know any "free speech absolutists" who argue that fraud should be legal. Misrepresentation of a product or service you're selling is fraud. We already have laws against that.

Then consider yourself lucky, but I've seen that position argued strenuously right here on HackerNews in the past.

This has actually been a fairly common position among American libertarians. Alan Greenspan, for instance, was strongly against fraud laws until some time after the financial crisis. The idea was that the market would sort it out.

(And no, I don't understand how this is a serious position that serious people can seriously hold, but then that is how I feel about libertarianism in general.)

> American libertarians

The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central planning organizations on the planet for so long. If central planning is libertarian then I'm a blue whale.

The term "free market" gets misused just as much. It's not a free market if the government (or the Fed, which is just an arm of the government) has its thumb on the scales.

It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist.

Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns.

> It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist.

This is an oxymoron. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be involuntary. So you can't have a free market with government's thumb on the scales.

> Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns.

Historically, this is simply false. There have been societies that did not have governments that could manipulate markets, and they did not work this way.

In terms of guns, in such societies everyone had guns; there was no one who had overwhelming military force at their disposal. (They also had less wealth inequality than modern societies with governments.)

> Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be involuntary.

Here is a list of transactions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repugnant_market) we're making illegal next Tuesday. Note that after Tuesday, all market transactions are still voluntary. Therefore your claim is wrong. (In other words you're not considering positive and negative freedoms).

> In terms of guns, in such societies everyone had guns; there was no one who had overwhelming military force at their disposal.

Tell me about power laws.

I recommend Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.

> Therefore your claim is wrong.

No, it isn't. You are simply giving evidence that a market with any government intervention is not a free market. Which is perfectly true.

Whether the particular interventions governments make are good policy is a separate question. A free market is a tool. So are government interventions. Sometimes you have to make tradeoffs. But that doesn't change the fact that they are tradeoffs: that every time the government intervenes in a market, it means the market is no longer a free market, because some transactions are not voluntary. (Or because some transactions that would be voluntary if they happened are prevented from happening; see further comments below.)

> Note that after Tuesday, all market transactions are still voluntary.

First, even taken literally, this claim is not true, because there are lots of other government interventions in place that dictate non-voluntary transactions (the most common, of course, being taxation).

Second, you're quibbling. I gave the short version of the proper definition of a free market; the full version includes that preventing transactions from occurring that otherwise would occur (because both parties benefit) by making them illegal also counts as making transactions non-voluntary. In other words, "voluntary" has two sides: not forcing people to make transactions they wouldn't voluntarily choose to make, and not preventing people from making transactions they would voluntarily choose to make.

> It's not a free market if the government... has its thumb on the scales

See, this is why libertarianism doesn't make sense. If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place. The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check. The alternative is Oliver Twist, ecological disaster, maybe even feudalism.

But we agree that there's a lot of hypocrisy on the Right in general. A lot of insider trading and "I'm a free speech absolutist" and then buying up mass media to censor people who don't agree with you.

> If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place.

Historically, if there is government intervention, then monopolies--created by governments--incumbents, and rich and powerful people run things.

Of course if you take a society which has managed to regulate some aspect of all that using government, and then take away that particular government regulation--while leaving all the other ways the governments puts its thumb on the scale in place--then things will get worse, at least in the short term.

But that in no way shows that the absence of a government's thumb on the scale in every aspect, long term makes things worse. Historically, there have been societies that had little or no government intervention in things (for example, saga period Iceland, or some of the American colonies before the British tried to tighten up on them after the French and Indian War), and they did not have the bad things you mention; they had the opposite, people being able to run their own lives and getting along just fine, precisely because there was no government that could force them to do stupid things because of some government granted monopoly or incumbent, or because rich and powerful people were using their wealth and power to co-opt the government--the way they do in societies that do have government intervention.

> The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check.

That's the ostensible purpose, but it doesn't work. Giving a government the power to intervene in what would otherwise be a free market just means the rich and powerful use their wealth and power to co-opt the government. Having a government actually makes their job easier: it's cheaper to buy a government than it is to buy an entire society.

> there's a lot of hypocrisy on the Right in general

There's a lot of hypocrisy on all sides of the political spectrum. I don't think the Right is any worse than others in that respect.

>If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you

But this has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not in any way cancel out responsibility for fraud.

Then you are not a free speech absolutist, and reasonable people will disagree about where the tipping point is.

Fire in a crowded theatre? CP? Threats of violence? Hate speech?

> I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.

And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.

Also, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food, I've got some oceanfront property in North Dakota I'd like to sell you. You do know, don't you, that antibiotics in your beef, for example, is done all the time in factory farming with government approval?

> prevent all possible bad things

Well that seems like a bad faith interpretation of my argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Bradford_sweets_poisoning

You included in your argument at least one bad thing that, as I pointed out, is not only not stopped by government regulation, it's explicitly permitted by it. The fact that there was a bad thing that happened before government regulation, which a government regulation was then passed to try to prevent, doesn't make your argument valid.

Which government are we talking about, please?

> And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards

Narrator: "Most humans didn't survive past year five due to preventable illnesses and food born contamination, the humans' ancestor's infant mortality rate was rather high before the age of food safety and soap".

> Narrator

Of what? Where are you getting this from?

It's a reference to the Arrested Development television show.

Last I checked that wasn't a documentary.

>And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.

Sure, with reduced life expectancy. If you're fine dying out in your 30's, maybe 40's at best you can eat whatever you want. Your body is pretty resilient to poison short term.

>, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food

Extremist takes aren't doing you a favor here. Like I just said, we can resist a surprising about of poisons short term. Many people indulge in alcohol after all. We have no need to strive for "all bad things" out of our food.

> with reduced life expectancy.

Most of that was due to high infant mortality. The average person who lived to adulthood did not die in their 30's.

This approach is great in theory, the problem is: it does not scale. We are bombarded with a lot of information in the news, ads, social media, and average individual does not have enough time (not to mention access to information, or intelligence to interpret it) to fact check everything on their own. "The last man who knew everything" lived in early 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Man_Who_Knew_Everythi...

You don't need to fact check the torrent of information you describe. You can just ignore it. None of it is worth the time and effort to fact check anyway. You don't need any of that information to make the decisions you need to make in your daily life.

If you want to argue that you need to fact check all that information to, for example, decide how to vote in elections, none of that information is of any value for that purpose either, because it's basically all propaganda at this point. There are no "independent" sources of information that you can trust, other than your own eyeballs and brain. (Possibly you are lucky enough to have some friends and family whose eyeballs and brain you can also trust.)

First of all, there's a difference between facts and understanding. Thomas Young may have understood the wave theory of light, but he could say nothing with certainty about Queen Victoria's underwear. Secondly, it's getting easier to understand everything, because ideas are becoming more powerful. We are however bombarded with facts, that part is true.

Not sure European governments do much to combat external propaganda anyway.

Sadly very true, I hope the hostility American officials recently showed toward our values and institutions will prompt them to do something. Not to mention America siding with Putin a few days ago.

A ban on X and Meta would be a start.

Hi, American here. Just want to say I'm embarrassed to share a nation with this nutcase. Sorry, friends.

Those who turn discussions about degrees of something into fights about binary extremes are the true problem. Media and politicians included.

Not even most Americans believe that. I would say paradoxically we have a slice of folks who want liberty from the government and also have plenty of government protections.

Then there is the "liberty at all costs" types, the fringe of which idolizes the David Koresh lifestyle.

There are plenty of folks who also think it is OK to ruin someone's entire life if they post something sexist to Twitter.

Americans are not so easily generalized; they come in many flavors.

Seeing how almost everyone here in France despises our current government, I don't think this propaganda you mention is very effective, if it's as present as you claim.

Meanwhile money basically dictates who gets elected on your side of the pond, whith billionaires being crazy over-represented in your political offices, despite being a tiny minority in your population.

Also, the people advocating for smaller government are often on board with executive power consolidation and increased police and army funding, so I think it's little more than a stance.

You can't "discover the truth" on your own, no one can. Are you able to go everywhere something happens in the wordl to get a first hand account of the event and then build your own conclusions? Of course not, you rely on media (social or legacy) to digest the facts for you, and they might (and do) influence you and how you think about the world. It can't be another way, so fighting obvious lies isn't a bad thing in my book.

> It just fuels my personal theory that americans only reason in positive liberty (freedom to...) and never in negative liberty (freedom from...).

This seems to describe ‘Murican Freedom pretty well to this particular American, for what it’s worth.

I would expect it to be argued by defendants that since no man (or indeed woman) at Meta actually read the books that were torrented, the First Amendment does not apply here. The question is: does the First Amendment apply to an algorithm?

> The question is: does the First Amendment apply to an algorithm?

No. The first amendment explicitly applies to Congress; by extension it applies to the policy-making authority of the federal government generally, and via the 14th amendment, it applies to the states.

It prohibits the abridgment of freedom of speech by government institutions, without distinction as to the identity of the speaker or the content of the speech.

So I can setup a cable streaming service with ripped vids as long a no one in my company watches it?

You would be distributing the videos. Meta is not distributing the things they torrented. No, LLM weights don't count.

If nobody watches it, then technically no copies of the video have been distributed.

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