cryptoanarchy.wiki

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1997-06-09 - Re: Fraud and free speech

Header Data

From: Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Message Hash: 95e8a7a0616f567afdf02506fc3e863c3dcff1488047114c5538078cdff78048
Message ID: <19970608191152.24366@bywater.songbird.com>
Reply To: <v03102802afc0e602d172@[207.167.93.63]>
UTC Datetime: 1997-06-09 15:18:25 UTC
Raw Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 23:18:25 +0800

Raw message

From: Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 23:18:25 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Fraud and free speech
In-Reply-To: <v03102802afc0e602d172@[207.167.93.63]>
Message-ID: <19970608191152.24366@bywater.songbird.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



On Sun, Jun 08, 1997 at 06:14:59PM -0500, William H. Geiger III wrote:
>In <v03102802afc0e602d172@[207.167.93.63]>, on 06/08/97 
>   at 03:48 PM, Tim May <tcmay@got.net> said:
[...]
>>Contracts, with clearly stated conditions and with judgeable or
>>falsifiable/testable conditionals, are a matter for the courts (private
>>courts, in fact), but vague promises, advertisements, propaganda, etc.
>>are not.
>
>>Clear now?
>
>Well I would have to dissagre. Advertisements should be covered under
>contract law as verbal contracts. If I advertise that "X" does "Y" but it
>really does "Z" then this is clearly fraudulent behavior.
>
>The difficulty is in proving that "X" does "Z" and not "Y" but that is an
>exercise left to the civil courts.

I agree that advertisements are in many cases a verbal contract ("does
0-60mph in 5 seconds flat"), but this seems to be intrinsically messy. 
There aren't any simple, clear-cut rules that separate advertising
from other speech. 

But the fundamental principle that says "redress is available for speech
that causes harm" seems fairly clean.  That cuts across advertising,
salespersons lies, libel/slander, yelling "fire" in a theater -- a
whole gamut of free speech issues.  Spam falls under such a rule, as
well.  Of course, the issue of prior restraint is orthogonal to this 
rule... 

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html

Thread