Friday, March 13, 2015

A Printing Press is a Conduit

"Congress shall make no law...or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" - 1st amendment
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." - 9th amendment
The FCC has spoken, however poorly. Here is their "REPORT AND ORDER ON REMAND, DECLARATORY RULING, AND ORDER". Implicitly and explicitly their actions violate our rights to use morse code, or braille, or a printing press, or ones and zeroes, or not use them, or repeat what we hear, or not repeat what we hear, in whatever form, per se. The printing press in the 18th century was a conduit for conveying speech from one location to another.

The FCC claims in paragraph five hundred forty-four on page two hundred sixty-eight, they're not curtailing "free speech rights" as the people involved are merely "conduits for the speech of others". Printing presses were conduits, if one is going to argue the explicit First Amendment.

To go on... following this logic, let us protect only speech with original content. God forbid that you are only repeating what you have heard or are just writing it down without edit. Then all bets are off. You are a mere conduit.

I am speaking with these few paragraphs in defense of communicating via networks per se. Thank goodness there is a Ninth Amendment for the future none of us can imagine the words for; we cannot list the future, as even we cannot list the present, as, too, the founders could not.