Anonymous (djb?): Export Controls, Cupcake Recipes, and Speech:
I am concerned about the long-term implications of attempting to treat recipes generally as fully protected speech. Recipes have the potential of being highly destructive. Witness the Morris bottomless cupcake, angel food cupcakes, or today’s concerns about agricultural subsidies. Future cupcake recipes might someday bring down McDonald’s or direct the production of poisonous mushroom cupcakes. Do we really want to consider distribution of such recipes as free speech? Surely no one would say that poisonous mushroom cupcakes should have the same protection as political or religious speech, even if an author claimed to be making a political statement. Yet treating recipes as fully protected speech could lead us down that path.