On Fri, 7 May 1999, Anonymous wrote:
> These wanna-be tech lawyers really need to learn about what they
> plan on spewing opinions about.
>
> Programmers exchange source like composers exchange compositions: because
> there is no simpler way to communicate. The fact that some people
> can't read music (or code) is their inadequacy. The fact that
> machines can interpret musical (or algorithmic) notation is useful,
> but irrelevant. For instance, there are many domain-specific algorithmic
> languages which can be hand-simulated but haven't been implemented.
> Certain kinds of natural philosophy ("logic") employ such systems, for
> instance.
>
> When a person reads english, the symbols trigger more-or-less defined
> changes in the reader's internal representations. Similarly for a person
> reading code, music, law, or a blueprint. In these latter fields, the
> meaning of symbols has been honed over time, to make them more or less
> precise (consider that the algorithmic language "C" was not originally well
> defined e.g., in the sense of the size of its integers). But the
> precision of one's speech cannot be used to limit first amendment protections.
I am normally a lurker on this list, but a couple of comments on code as
speech come to mind. When musicians talk, they do it (often) via
scores. Chemists do it with those geometric doodles (that's
frightening). I am myself a programmer, and I can easily affirm that
programmers *very* often communicate via code "snnippets", or small
pieces (10-20 printed lines) of code, which might be used to elucidate a
particular algorithm.
If this is communcations (what I illustrate above, between musicians,
chemists, or programmers), then in this spirit, source code is speech.
It is most certainly *not* strictly used to communicate with computers,
and any journeyman programmer would verify this. I can't say if this
means it's protected like other speech; I would wish it were so.
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Chuck Robey | Interests include any kind of voice or data
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | communications topic, C programming, and Unix.
213 Lakeside Drive Apt T-1 |
Greenbelt, MD 20770 | I run picnic (FreeBSD-current)
(301) 220-2114 | and jaunt (Solaris7).
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