3-D Printing and Free Speech

     Last night WIRED.com posted an article about a law suit against the state department filed by Cody Wilson, that claimed that the state department had infringed upon Mr. Wilson's right to free speech by requiring him to remove some of his company's blueprints from the internet. You may remember Cody Wilson's name because he and his company Defense Distributed released the first publicly accessible set of blueprints for a 3-D printed pistol roughly 2 years ago.

     We talked in class a fair bit about what gun makers and sellers have a moral obligation to do in terms of controlling what they sell and who they sell it to. Defense Distributed's mission strikes me as a very interesting twist on that discussion because they are not actually selling or manufacturing weapons. They are, however, deliberately choosing to distribute the blueprints so that anyone can make a weapon if they have a consumer grade 3-D printer. On the one hand this strikes me as highly problematic. Is there really any moral difference between selling a gun to an individual with a high potential for misuse (think people with a history of violence or mental instability) and making guns available to them? On the other hand, restricting the posting of the blueprints does seem to violate the free speech rights of Cody Wilson. The blueprints really are essentially his ideas and thoughts in picture and schematic form (basically the same as an artist's paintings or sketches) and it does seem as though he has at least a default right to share them as a result of his right to free speech along with basic property rights. This does, however, strike me as a case of the type of free speech that we might be willing to restrict because it can cause immediate harm to others. We might want to prevent the publishing of this type of information for the same reasons that we make it illegal to yell fire in a crowded theater but that doesn't necessarily mean that his rights haven't been violated.

     In any case I would be curios to hear people's responses to this version of the firearms debate because I do think that it introduces new elements and conflicts between rights and a desire to reduce risk of harm. Here is a link to the original article for more information: <http://www.wired.com/2015/05/3-d-printed-gun-lawsuit-starts-war-arms-control-free-speech/>