We're Not Censoring You, Just Your Computer

We're not censoring you, just your printing press.<p>This whole dialogue is ridiculous.

The NYT article this is in response to was discussed here:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4139519" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4139519</a>

The internet was different from the radio and television, but now it seems that governments want to prohibit its provocative nature.<p>The problem is though, is that the internet is two way communication oppose to one way like most radio and television, and that attempting to "limit" it, means limiting one path of that communication, us.<p>I feel like regulating the internet will cause more harm than allowing a few miscreants to organize through it. The miscreants will always find a way. Like DRM, this will only hurt the innocent and ignorant, not the savvy and mischievous.

We're not censoring you, we're just censoring the air in between your mouth and other people's ears. Air can't have rights, so this is not a problem.

I think this question is much more interesting regarding WolframAlpha than a normal search engine. A search engine listing is just a directory of links (although Google and friends are adding new capabilities constantly) where a WolframAlpha result is a curated, rewritten summary of the content in question.<p>Right now, WolframAlpha is one of the nearest things we have to the "advanced Artificial Intelligence" from the article; in a certain sense, it actually <i>does</i> create new content. Should this have speech protections? From an ideological point of view, I think it should, but I am sure about its legal status. A question I'm not even sure about ideologically is copyright--how much copyright protection do you give to things like WolframAlpha's result pages?<p>Either way, the most important point is that the future where computers produce novel and useful content is not the future at all--it's now.

Similar arguments are made regarding campaign finance: "We're not regulating your speech, we're regulating your money.".

If text written by computer programmed by human isn't a product of human, it surely can't be protected by copyright?

Concrete examples here would make this whole debate a lot clearer.<p>It's important to realize that the choice isn't between "Computers have free speech" vs "The government can censor anything a computer does". The choice is between "existing free-speech precedent applies to computers" vs "computer program output falls into some other legal framework which we might not have figured out yet".<p>The only legal case which seems to be mentioned in either article is a nine-year-old suit against Google by someone unhappy with Google's ranking of search results. In that case, the court bought Google's argument that "Hey, our ranking can say whatever we like, free speech". But as to how far that argument goes, it hasn't yet been tested.<p>US free speech law means that it's <i>very</i> hard to be held legally liable for any consequences of your speech. On the other hand, if you build a machine, you can in many circumstances be held liable for what that machine does. Now, is a computer program more like speech, or is it more like a machine?

Worth Mentioning: Cato is a Koch Bros. group with a very <i>very</i> far right bent. Evaluate everything said with that in mind.