Thursday, October 20, 2005

Crime-Facilitating Speech

"Any attempts to suppress crime-facilitating speech will be highly imperfect, especially in the Internet age. Copies of instructions for making explosives, producing illegal drugs, or decrypting proprietary information will likely always be available somewhere, either on foreign sites or on American sites that the law hasn’t yet shut down or deterred. The Hit Man contract murder manual, for instance, is available for free on the Web, even though a civil lawsuit led its publisher to stop distributing it. (If the civil lawsuit that led the publisher to stop selling the book also made the publisher more reluctant to try to enforce the now-worthless copyright, the suit might thus have actually made the book more easily, cheaply, and anonymously available.) Source: Stanford Law Review (Volokh)

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