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THIS WEEK MARKS the two-year anniversary since Cody Wilson, the inventor of the world’s first 3-D printable gun, received a letter from the State Department demanding that he remove the blueprints for his plastic-printed firearm from the internet. The alternative: face possible prosecution for violating regulations that forbid the international export of unapproved arms.
Now Wilson is challenging that letter. And in doing so, he’s picking a fight that could pit proponents of gun control and defenders of free speech against each other in an age when the line between a lethal weapon and a collection of bits is blurrier than ever before.
Wilson’s gun manufacturing advocacy group Defense Distributed, along with the gun rights group the Second Amendment Foundation, on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the State Department and several of its officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry. In their complaint, they claim that a State Department agency called the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) violated their first amendment right to free speech by telling Defense Distributed that it couldn’t publish a 3-D printable file for its one-shot plastic pistol known as the Liberator, along with a collection of other printable gun parts, on its website.
In its 2013 letter to Defense Distributed, the DDTC cited a long-controversial set of regulations known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which controls whether and how Americans can sell weapons beyond U.S. borders. By merely posting a 3-D-printable file to a website, in other words, the DDTC claimed Defense Distributed had potentially violated arms export controls—just as if it had shipped a crate of AR-15s to, say, Mexico. But the group’s lawsuit now argues that whether or not the Liberator is a weapon, its blueprints are “speech,” and that Americans’ freedom of speech is protected online—even when that speech can be used to make a gun with just a few clicks.
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/3-d-printed-gun-lawsuit-starts-war-arms-control-free-speech/
Here’s the full complaint from Defense Distributed: https://www.scribd.com/doc/264435890/Defense-Distributed-et-al-v-U-S-Dept-of-State
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @03:39PM
It's not that the State Department like bullying citizens, or some grand conspiracy of Obama/FEMA-grabs-guns.
Keep in mind the State Department is concerned with relations with other countries, as well as treaty enforcement. Obviously, some nation which has strict gun control (I'd guess England or Japan for starters,) has complained to the State Department about the files. ("OMG! Now the nogoodniks in our country can make their own guns too!") So now State takes action it knows it cannot win, such that when the request is dropped because of the lawsuit (or it goes to a verdict and is overturned,) the State Deparment can reply to the nation in question, "We'd like to stop it, but unfortunately the plans themselves are covered by our First Amendment. Sorry, but you'll have to censor the Internet on your side if you want to restrict them."
Ultimately nobody is harmed and the State Department saves face instead of denying the request outright with a, "not gonna' do nuthin' for you, ally, free-speech-fuck-you!" They get to kiss the other nation first, anyway.
Such is politics. Rarely do we at the ground level really have enough information and insight to know the actual machinations. Don't like it? Run for office...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @03:41PM
Ultimately nobody is harmed
Except the people who have to deal with this bullshit and file lawsuits, right?
(Score: 2) by physicsmajor on Friday May 08 2015, @03:54PM
No. Absolutely nothing you just said is acceptable or even remotely correct. There is a known, deterministic hierarchy of the laws in this country, and it works as follows:
See that at the top up there? It's the Constitution. It's above all treaties and trade agreements, and it doesn't matter if the trade agreement says otherwise or how the parties on the other end of said agreement feel. In such cases the treaty is void or rendered nullified by the superior authority. In this case, they can complain all they want but it will have identically zero effect. If they don't like that, or if they feel we've violated the agreement (which, if true, we should never have entered into in the first place, but I digress), they are free to voluntarily leave the agreement.
tl;dr - if any party we're connected to via a trade agreement or treaty were to request such a thing, the agreement is either null and shouldn't have been entered into in the first place or that party is grossly overstepping their perceived authority.
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Friday May 08 2015, @04:26PM
Known and deterministic? You evince a misunderstanding of the way laws and societies work in the real world. I know that communities that are heavy with software developers (many Slashbots were just like you) think that law is like code, and that if it is written in some way, then that's how the system must run. In real life, government and relationships between portions of society (as well as between our government and other governments) work according to a complex interplay of competing interests, which is not always faithful to the legal framework or the supposed spirit behind those laws. Sure, if someone sees that a law has been violated, then he/she has the right to seek redress through prescribed avenues, since that's one of the ways that a large society regulates itself, but you only make yourself look like an out-of-touch Aspie or nerd to wag your figure and act like the law is somehow independent of the interest groups living in the country that has enacted said laws.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @04:48PM
but you only make yourself look like an out-of-touch Aspie
By the same logic, are you making yourself look like an out-of-touch Aspie when you react to someone saying that the law works a certain way in theory by saying that it doesn't always work out in practice? "Aspie" really shouldn't be used as a generic insult, anyway.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday May 09 2015, @02:22AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @07:06PM
Obviously a physics major.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Friday May 08 2015, @08:39PM
Physics major believes all legal questions are settled deterministically based on objective rules organized as a poset. Classic!
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 08 2015, @04:29PM
the State Department saves face instead of denying the request outright with a, "not gonna' do nuthin' for you, ally, free-speech-fuck-you!" They get to kiss the other nation first, anyway.
Sure, because the only two options are to do what they say, or say, "Fuck you get stuffed." You'd think that for people whose job it is to do stuff tactfully, they could probably find a more polite way to say, "No."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"