Code is speech
Finally, somebody has found an example of code which can kill someone: genetic code for viruses, which can now be transmitted effectively (one can imagine lethally) across a digital medium. (On the other end, though, you do need a virus-assembling mechanism.)
DVD litigation fans will recall that Judge Kaplan compared DeCSS to a pathogen, where other people have compared it to poetry. (And then, of course, there's Daniel Alter. But mostly in the United States it's legal to teach people how to kill people. In fact, the government does that today. I wonder if the work of Wimmer et al. will give new meaning to "publishing a virus" and whether courts will be prepared to protect that as speech.)
