An interesting legal conundrum. When Nike was accused of running sweatshops in Asia, it responded with press releases and ads claiming that it did not. Marc Kasky filed a case saying that Nike was advertising unfairly, and won. Now corporates are raising the question of whether corporate statements are free speech, and can be similarly protected.
A truly inspired way of describing DeCSS: DeCSS haikus. (I hope linking to it is not illegal.)
Preliminary indications are good. DeCSS is legal (so far.)
Unfortunate, but among the early hits of the attack are privacy and free speech.
Two MIT students have written a 7-line program that unscrambles protected DVDs. It’s downloadable. The legal issue is whether source code deserves protection on par with freedom of expression.
Freedrive closes public storage space. Along with Napster, that’s a nail in the coffin of free software. But what about the argument that code is speech, and hence “free speech”?