The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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April 25, 2003
Nike: Free speech champions Rand knows I love my Kazaa, but there brews a Supreme Court case on free speech considerably more important than P2P. In the case of Nike v. Kasky, No. 02-575, the Supreme Court could strike a big blow for free speech. Nike has been screwed with for five years under unconstitutional laws regarding "commercial speech" simply for making statements and taking out ads to defend themselves against charges of bad labor practices.
Solicitor General Ted Olson, representing the Bush administration, has suggested sidestepping the basic underlying issue of whether Nike was engaging in First Amendment free speech, but give Nike the ruling on other legal grounds. Boo, hiss. Chickenshit.
The court could decide the case on perhaps several different types of grounds, but the most basic one calling out to them is the artificial legal distinction between protected free speech versus somehow less protected commercial speech. Since the 1942 Valentine v. Chrestensen decision, the court has sort of halfway drifted toward accepting the commified idea that free speech protections do not apply to any person or group who might conceivably in any way make a buck from what they are saying. The constitution details no such distinction. To put it differently, commie-types just made it up out of the air. Deroy Murdock has more HERE.
The most obviously egregious example of how this false distinction harms the public comes from the pharmaceutical industry. Drug manufacturers are prohibited from advertising the results of studies from themselves or other independent groups of benefits that can be derived from using their drugs other than ones formally recognized by the FDA. Doctors and patients get deprived of true and highly useful information. The legal excuse justifying the government's right to censor them is simply that the drug companies might profit from spreading this (true and accurate) information. This is a more egregious violation of civil liberties, one with worse impact on the public, than about anything involved in the dreaded Patriot Act.
Commie left wingers who don't like granting Nike free speech parity might take into consideration what kind of stick this arbitrary distinction represents, and how it can come back to bite you in the ass. Compared to the indirect commercial interest of the specific facts of the Nike case, Eminem records are obviously HIGHLY commercial speech. He's just saying that stuff to make money, so why shouldn't he be subject to reasonable commercial restrictions as to what he can say just like for Nike or drug manufacturers?
In this Nike case, the court could just take a big broom and make a clean sweep. Just say the obvious and true thing that speech is speech, a press is a press. It would clarify and simplify a great many matters, and we would have more freedom.
