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Comment by tessierashpool | Hacker News Reader

> If "free speech" was a valid defense for you, then Meta would be doing the same.

Meta lobbied heavily for this. The fact that they have not decided to use free speech to fight the move that they are lobbying for is not an argument that free speech is irrelevant here.

This is not legal advice but a personal request: please do not get your legal advice from Hacker News. Get it from a lawyer.

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Meta is a company. I am an individual.

Alright, then let me rephrase:

> If "free speech" was a valid defense to any legal compliance laws that affect software, then any software company would raise this defense this rather than comply.

And in fact, Apple in 2016 went to court rather than comply with the government's order to put a backdoor in the iPhone, and they argued their case in part on free speech grounds.

Whether other companies do the same depends on what they consider the most profitable path, including legal fees and risk.

Don’t read too much into the Apple case. There was no precedent set by that. The FBI withdrew their demands after they found a different mechanism to obtain what they needed.

Of course there was no precedent set. They were using a precedent that had already been set. We'll never know how it would have turned out, but the previous comment implied that corporations always comply rather than going to court on the grounds that code is speech, so I posted a well-known counterexample.

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