Support NeoGAF

[Metaphoreus]

From the New York Times:

When is a gun not just a gun? When it’s also constitutionally protected free speech.

That is the legal argument being made by Cody Wilson, a Texas man who gained attention two years ago by posting what are believed to be the world’s first online instructions for how to build a 3-D printable gun. Mr. Wilson’s files for what he called the Liberator, a single-shot pistol mostly made of plastic, were partly a statement about freedom in the digital age and partly a provocation — and provoke they did.

A few days after the plans for the Liberator were put online, the State Department ordered Mr. Wilson to remove them, threatening him with jail time and million-dollar fines for having possibly broken rules that govern the export of military data.

Now, with a high-powered legal team behind it, Mr. Wilson’s company, Defense Distributed, has filed suit against the State Department, claiming that its efforts to stop him from publishing his plans, which are no more than computer code, amount to a prior restraint on free speech. The 25-page suit, filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Austin, Tex., is an innovative and apparently unprecedented effort to use the First Amendment in support of the Second.

From the Second Amendment Foundation's press release:

The Second Amendment Foundation today joined Defense Distributed of Austin, Texas, in filing a federal lawsuit against Secretary of State John Kerry, the Department of State and other federal officials, seeking to stop the Government’s unconstitutional censorship of information related to the three-dimensional printing of arms.

The Government’s restraint against the publication of this critical information, under the guise of controlling arms exports, violates the First Amendment right to free speech, the Second Amendment right to bear arms, and the Fifth Amendment right to due process, the lawsuit alleges.

SAF and Defense Distributed seek to publish 3-D printing information at no cost to the public. Constitutional attorney Alan Gura of Gura & Possessky leads the litigation team, which also includes William “Tommy” Jacks, Bill Mateja, and David Morris of Fish & Richardson; export control counsel Matthew Goldstein, and constitutional law Professor Josh Blackman.

“Americans have always been free to exchange information about firearms and manufacture their own arms,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “We also have an expectation that any speech regulations be spelled out clearly, and that individuals be provided basic procedural protections if their government claims a power to silence them.”

Note that Gura was the mastermind behind D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago.

For more, here's the Complaint, and here's a law review article by a professor involved in the lawsuit discussing some of the issues raised.

Interesting times, and an interesting conundrum for the government, to say the least.