GDaddy said:
The 1A argument came about in the first place because the Commerce Dept slapped a cease and desist on these guys for violating laws about exporting weapons technology. I guess the idea was that the code to run the CNC or 3D printer to build a gun was a step further towards exporting guns than a book or Youtube that shows people how to do it by hand.
IIRC, it was not the Commerce Dept, but the State Department. The 1A argument comes in because this is clearly content-based speech, and the bad news for the State Department is that any content-based speech restriction automatically merits strict scrutiny:
"Content-based laws — those that target speech based on its communicative content — are presumptively unconstitutional and may be justified only if the government proves they are narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests." Reed v. Town of Gilbert, ___ U.S. ___, 135 S.Ct. 2218, 2226, 192 L.Ed.2d 236 (2015).
I think a snowball has a better chance of enjoying a 2-week vacation in Hell than the State Dept has of winning this case. The real issue is will the beat-down be a narrow one, or will a higher court open up lots of room with a violent reaming.
The anti-2A types who fought this were very poorly advised; their best-case scenario is a per curiam loss with a minimum of verbiage, but I could easily see them losing broad areas of applicability -- their assumption that "export" automatically applies to the internet is untested, plus they operate with a public domain exception which obviously applies to the internet and a higher court could easily remind them of that, so the next time this happens, they have no authority at all.
So much wrong with the State Depts position on this; it's almost impossible to know where to start. Hack off a chunk and start chewing, I guess. Prior restraint? It's seriously endless.
