Posts Tagged code

Bill Attacks First and Second Amendment By Calling For CAD File Ban

From Ammoland:

The bill reads: “It shall be unlawful for any person to intentionally distribute, over the internet or by means of the World Wide Web, digital instructions in the form of Computer Aided Design files or other code that can automatically program a 3-dimensional printer or similar device to produce a firearm or complete a firearm from an unfinished frame or receiver.”

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Gun Control Is Dead Thanks To 3-D Printing

From Bearing Arms:

I’ve long argued that 3D-printed guns represent the death of gun control. After all, if the purpose of gun control is to keep firearms out of the hands of certain people–be that just criminals or, in time, everyone–the existence of 3d printers and the files one would use to make firearms means you’ll never accomplish that goal.

Anyone who wants a gun can get a gun and there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do to stop it.

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NY Attacks First and Second Amendment With One Law

From Ammoland:

New York is tackling the 3D-printed gun community by trying to ban the 3D printing of firearms and prevent the sharing of computer-aided design (CAD) files.

New York State Senator Brad Hoylman is sponsoring the bill. The Democrat says he wants to “attack the manufacture” of 3D Printed firearms. It would not only make it a felony to print guns but also ban the intentional sharing of files, raising First Amendment concerns. Writings like the Anarchist Cookbook and the guide to build a Luty machine gun have been determined to be protected speech. Many believe that these files are also protected speech.

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Defense Distributed Starts New Phase

From The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Wilson said he believed his release of the files would be “impervious” to legal challenge and would help normalize the distribution of such material for easy download in the future.

Mr. Wilson is offering access to the files for an annual fee of $50, characterizing his service as “Netflix for 3-D guns.”

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Blueprints Of Guns Not Allowed, Court Says

From Ars Technica:

In a 2-1 decision, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was not persuaded that Defense Distributed’s right to free speech under the First Amendment outweighs national security concerns.

Ordinarily, of course, the protection of constitutional rights would be the highest public interest at issue in a case. That is not necessarily true here, however, because the State Department has asserted a very strong public interest in national defense and national security. Indeed, the State Department’s stated interest in preventing foreign nationals—including all manner of enemies of this country—from obtaining technical data on how to produce weapons and weapon parts is not merely tangentially related to national defense and national security; it lies squarely within that interest.

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EFF Files Brief In Support Of Defense Distributed’s 3-D Files

From EFF:

The underlying legal ideas stretch back to one of EFF’s earliest major legal victories. Twenty years ago, in Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice, a judge articulated that code is speech inrejecting so-called export restrictions on code that implements cryptographic protocols. Daniel Bernstein, a mathematics Ph.D. student, wanted to publish source code for a program to run an algorithm he developed. He objected to the State Department classification of his code as a “munition” and, with EFF’s help, sued to establish his First Amendment right to publish the code without arbitrary restrictions outlined in the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and other laws—restrictions that included registering as an arms dealer and submitting the code for governmental review.

Read EFF’s full amicus brief here.

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Defense Distributed Sues State Department

From The New York Times:

Now, with a high-powered legal team behind it, Mr. Wilson’s company,Defense Distributed, a self-described “anti-monopolist digital publisher,” has filed suit against the State Department claiming that its efforts to stop him from publishing his instructions, which are no more than computer code, amount to a prior restraint on free speech. The 25-page suit, filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Austin, Tex., is an innovative and apparently unprecedented effort to use the First Amendment in support of the Second.

From Wired:

Wilson’s gun manufacturing advocacy group Defense Distributed, along with the gun rights group the Second Amendment Foundation, on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the State Department and several of its officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry. In their complaint, they claim that a State Department agency called the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) violated their first amendment right to free speech by telling Defense Distributed that it couldn’t publish a 3-D printable file for its one-shot plastic pistol known as the Liberator, along with a collection of other printable gun parts, on its website.

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