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To: Looking for Diogenes
And is text on the screen still a printing press?

The Constitution doesn't mention printing, only "the press". This is probably one area that does require some "interpretation, although not much. There is no practical, other than speed and cost of distribution, between the printed word and it's electronic equivalent. A court could disagree, but not reasonably. But clearly speech is still speech. The electronic distribution of that speech doesn't change that, and is really no different, logically, from a megaphone, which I'm sure the founders were familiar with, and which I know some people used at the time when speaking before a large crowd. (Perhaps one peaceably assembling?)

1,889 posted on 12/12/2003 3:02:31 PM PST by El Gato (Federal Judges can twist the Constitution into anything.. Or so they think.)
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To: El Gato
But clearly speech is still speech. The electronic distribution of that speech doesn't change that, and is really no different, logically, from a megaphone, which I'm sure the founders were familiar with, and which I know some people used at the time when speaking before a large crowd.

That makes a nice argument on a bulletin board, but in the real world it is absurd.

Radio waves are substantially different from sonic waves, and are necessarily treated differently in the law. Following your logic, the Federal Communications Commission and all the laws regulating radio and television broadcasts are unconstitutional. If spoken speech and radio-broadcast speech were treated the same by the law then I should be able to build a transmitter of whatever power I like and transmit anything I like at whatever frequency I please, no matter how it interferes with other transmissions or offends the little children tuning in.

The laws which allow the government to regulate the radio waves and limit offensive speech on were carefully (and repeatedly) reviewed by the courts. They represent significant variances from the simple language of the 1st Amendment. The only ways we allow those regulations are either by amending the Constitution everytime a new technology comes along, or entrust the Congress, President, and Judiciary to try to interpret the core meaning of the Constitution to fit the new requirements.

1,892 posted on 12/12/2003 7:26:01 PM PST by Looking for Diogenes
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