An absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment would reconcile speech regulation with its fundamental meaning, that “Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech” or of the press by conferring monopolies in expression that otherwise would belong to the universe of discourses in which all are free to share. Of course this is a direct contradiction of the Intellectual Property clause of the Constitution but it may help inform our analysis. The application would then necessarily begin with the rebuttable presumption that any regulation of speech is unconstitutional. Of course, this is an inversion in thinking when compared to the DMCA safe harbor provision, because it completely shifts the presumption of illegality from the challenged speaker to the moving party. Certainly, this is not how the law, nor the courts, have viewed and interpreted speech rights to date. However, this type of inverted presumption might benefit future decisions if considered as a framework for internet speech rather than awkwardly overlaying common law doctrines of real world origin on the rather new and ever-changing phenomenon of the internet.
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