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What the appellate court held was that just because source code may be used to instruct a computer does not mean that it's not speech when used "to convey ideas and to communicate." That does not mean that source code is speech when used to instruct a computer. It means that source code isn't not speech just because sometimes you use it to instruct a computer. Logically, those are two very different statements.

The court wasn't saying that the government can't regulate what you can and cannot program a computer to do. It was saying that the government cannot restrict sharing of source code between people, which is often used to communicate ideas.




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