Do Video Games Dream of Electric Speech?

Tim Wu had an interesting op-ed column in Wednesday’s New York Times: Free Speech for Computers? Wu’s op-ed is in part a response to a paper co-authored by Eugene Volokh, entitled “First Amendment Protection for Search Engine Search Results.” (See also Volokh’s response; criticism by Tim Lee and Julian Sanchez.) Volokh and his co-author, Donald Falk of Mayer Brown, argue that search results, for example those produced by Google (which commissioned the paper), should be treated as speech worthy of First Amendment protection. (Hail, Search King!) Wu argues that this argument threatens to “elevate our machines above ourselves” by “giv[ing] computers . . . rights intended for humans.” The purpose of the First Amendment, Wu writes, is “to protect actual humans against the evil of state censorship.” But computers don’t need that protection: “Socrates was a man who died for his views; computer programs are utilitarian instruments meant to serve us.” Wu concludes: “The line can be easily drawn: as a general rule, nonhuman or automated choices should not be granted the full protection of the First Amendment, and often should not be considered “speech” at all.”

This debate intrigues me, not so much for how it applies to Google (although that is interesting too), but for how it applies to video games.

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The Titanic’s Connection to Electronic Communications Privacy

One hundred years ago this weekend, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank. The event was big news then and has remained so for a century, due in no small part to the number of wealthy people who died or were aboard: John Jacob Astor IV; Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon; Molly Brown; Benjamin Guggenheim; and Isidor Straus. It was a bit as if the Kodak Theatre caught fire during the Academy Awards. (Compare the Titanic to the RMS Empress of Ireland, which sank in the mouth of the St. Lawrence two years later with a loss of more passengers, although considerably fewer crew. Celine Dion sings no songs about the Empress of Ireland.)

There are many fascinating aspects of the story, including the recently uncovered evidence of what exactly caused the ship to sink — not a massive gash in its hull, as had long been supposed, but rather a buckling of the plates over five compartments, due in part to the failure of potentially substandard rivets. For want of a rivet, the Titanic was lost. And there’s also the interesting question of why there was so little panic among the passengers as the ship went down. But I want to focus on one that I’m fairly sure is not going to get covered this week: the connection between the sinking of the Titanic and our modern Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the federal law that makes it a crime to intercept communications without either a court order or the consent of one of the parties.

The connection stems from the role of “wireless telegraphy” — radio, as it’s now known — in the Titanic disaster.

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Spring and Fall

As Professor Mazzie noted below, April is National Poetry Month. (How have you been celebrating?) I thought I would take the occasion to post one of my favorites, from a poet who is not that well known any more: Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins wrote poems in a peculiar style; among other things, the stress marks in the lines below are intended to indicate emphasis — I think the poem works better if you follow them.

Spring and Fall

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

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