alt Hacker NewsI didn't claim it's a magic unassailable defense. I claimed, contrary to the previous comment, that it's a valid defense. Maybe the courts will carve out a new exception for some particular type of code, maybe they won't, but what they certainly won't do is laugh at you for defending your code on free speech grounds. Just because a legislature passes a law doesn't mean the courts will agree that the law is valid under the Constitution.
And the bar for compelling any particular speech is generally quite high. Apple could not be compelled to put a backdoor in an iPhone, even though the suspect was the San Bernardino shooter, and this did not result in Apple losing their ability to sell iPhones. The courts may well hold that you can't compel a Linux distro to implement a particular feature either.
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This may be a matter of semantics. To me, a “valid defense” is a defense that always prevails—for example, that truth is a defense to a defamation claim in U.S. law. The rest, I call “possible defenses.”
Another possible definition, one you may have meant, is that there's a set of "invalid defenses" that could not possibly work, and the remainder are "valid" even if they might not prevail.
> And the bar for compelling any particular speech is generally quite high. Apple could not be compelled to put a backdoor in an iPhone, even though the suspect was the San Bernardino shooter, and this did not result in Apple losing their ability to sell iPhones. The courts may well hold that you can't compel a Linux distro to implement a particular feature either.
That's an entirely different situation because Apple couldn't have complied with silence. A product compliance requirment doesn't typically count as compelled speech because you can comply with silence.
For instance, COPPA is a very similar law, and it is not compelled speech, because nobody is forcing you to write software that checks if users are 13 or older. You can comply with COPPA by simply not writing software that collects data from users that are under 13. You are not being compelled because you literally have the option not to do it.
That is exactly the same in this case.