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Comment by swehner | Hacker News Reader

Exactly, that's not a free speech issue, and talking like that is cynical.

What are you talking about? Compelling an artist to create and sign a work is absolutely a free speech issue.

Here is how one commonly goes about defining free speech, "Freedom of speech is the right to communicate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship."

So that's a great freedom.

What you're saying is the other way around.

FWIU, _compelled speech_ is unconstitutional too.

How do you distinguish this case from the obligation to sign tax returns? (I think that is 26 U.S. Code § 6061, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6061)

The talk a bit about it here, https://www.irs.gov/Tax-Professionals/The-Truth-About-Frivol...

And this is kind of similar but about the 5th Amendment. http://openjurist.org/775/f2d/1292/eh-mosher-v-internal-reve...

Could Apple then invalidate what it was previously coerced to say AND not expect government retaliation or censorship?

I'm not sure if you are trolling or not, but that is very obviously a free speech issue.

Disagreeing. Nothing "very obvious" about it.

If you can compel speech, then you can effectively censor people by forcing them to disavow their messages, and then burying their signal in compelled noise.

Or to put it another way, compelling speech is denying the right to send the null message.

Yes, that is not a useful way of looking at the issue.

Noone cares about the "null message".

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