>I agree. There -is- a little nit in that they seem to conflate
>"low-level", "assembly language", and "machine code" as all being
>exactly the same thing, with the implicit presumption that humans
>never read or write assembly language and that only a "high-level"
>language like C or Lisp might be appropriately protected as being
>speech and not purely functional. This would seem to be a problem
I don't see the term "assembly" anywhere in the opinion, and in
context I don't think this court would have a problem classifying an
assembler implementation of DES as "source code" for the purposes of
First Amendment protection. After all, both C and assembler are
"source code" written so humans can understand it.
They do say
"We express no opinion regarding whether object code manifests a
"close enough nexus to expression" to warrant application of the prior
restraint doctrine."
because object code was not at issue in this case. Of course, even if
the First Amendment protections were ultimately limited to source
code, it would be a simple manner to distribute a makefile (and
possibly a compiler) with the source so a user could generate object
code as needed.
Perhaps it would actually be a blessing to have such a restriction to
source code. It would help boost the Open Source movement, and it
would also help make distributed encryption code easier to examine for
bugs and trojan horses...
Phil
