Freedom of Speech
There is a common missunderstanding between “Freedom of Speech” and “Obligation to Distribute”. I was reminded of that when I read “Conscientious Objection in P2P“, an interesting article by Ed Felton. Ed explains how anybody could refuse to help finding “bad files” while downloading “good files” using BitTorrent. With BitTorrent, you only distrubute what you download, but your downloading PC also holds index-information about a small subset of all files on the network. Thus you might help others to find out who is offering files you would rather not see distributed. By refusing to share index information about such “bad files”, you could keep you conscience clean. After explainig this, Ed backs up with the following quote:
By now, some of you are jumping up and down, shaking your fingers at me. This is an affront to free speech, you’re saying — every file should be available to everybody. To which I reply: don’t blame me.
But wait a moment…this is not “Free Speech”, is it? Free speech is you right to say something. You might even go so far and extend it to the right to spread files across the internet, although IMO that is quite a stretch. But your right to free speech, which is guaranteed in many countries’ constitutions, does not go so far as you could tell me what I have to say.
If you say something that I don’t like, I don’t need to give you a stage for it. If you think I am stupid, well you can go ahead and tell anybody about it. You can even post it to the internet. But I don’t heve to provide the webspace for you to do so. On my blog, I can write just about anything I like. But you are not obliged to link to my site, are you?
So, if I chose not to index files I don’t like (or might even be illegal where I live!), I am not restricting free speech. If many in a community decide not to index a certain file and as a result it may become harder to access, nobody limits free speech.
Or as Coach Prejean always said in my high-school civics-class: “The freedom of my fist ends where your nose begins.” - How true !
Leave a Reply