On Friday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a 25-year-old nonprofit dedicated to protecting civil liberties in new media and communication platforms, filed a brief in support of Defense Distributed, claiming that “the government has gone too far by restricting online speech generally about certain technologies, and requiring would-be publishers to ask for a license to speak–in a process with no binding standards or meaningful government deadlines and no judicial oversight.” Here’s the key statement from their brief: In America, which has permissive gun laws, the existence of files to 3D-print guns is unlikely to noticeably increase the potential danger from guns. And if America is, through the State Department, trying to protect people in countries like Japan and Australia with strong controls on guns, they’ll find that those nations have already used local laws to penalize the weapons and arrest gunmakers. Enforcing an arms control treaty against electronic files risks squashing speech, and attempts to solve a problem that is already under control.
