You know the old saying about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions? Well, I’m not sure it’s leading to Hell, but Arizona’s HB 2549 has all the hallmarks of being such a paving stone.
On its face, the bill appears to be an attempt by the Arizona Legislature to craft a law that would discourage and punish behavior that really is pretty hard to defend, like cyber-stalking/bullying and online harassment of various stripes. As such, it’s not the intent of the bill that is troubling, but the scope of its language.
As UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh notes, there’s nothing in the bill that limits its application to the sort of one-to-one communications governed by existing laws that punish obscene or harassing phone calls, leaving open the possibility that all sorts of online speech could be subject to HB 2549, should Governor Jan Brewer sign it into law (which she hasn’t done yet).
My concern with this bill is not that it would be used to target porn companies like ours (while I’m not a lawyer, I don’t see how that’s feasible under the plain language of the statute, as porn companies typically don’t produce content or descriptions aimed at offending, annoying or intimidating some specific recipient) but that it could be used to target speech that might not be pleasant, or particularly “valuable,” but which ought to enjoy the protection of the First Amendment, anyway.
Hopefully Governor Brewer will veto this bill, and we’ll never have to find out if it serves to chill online speech in my home state.
UPDATE: Apparently, the bill has been stopped, was never passed by the Arizona Legislature, and never sent to Jan Brewer’s desk in the first place. I’m planning to write a separate post about Rep. Vic Williams’ characterization of the bill’s various critics as tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists, but for now, I’ll just content myself with the fact that this legislative error has been preempted, and hope that any future version of the bill will have the sort of limiting construction that the previous version lacked.
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