A Comment on Malwarebytes v. Enigma

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this article is not and should not be relied on as legal advice.

On first glance, Malwarebytes v. Enigma may not seem to be very important. It doesn't seem to be. It's one of those cases where one party has appealed a case all the way up to the Supreme Court, but it doesn't think the case is important enough for them to take.

But, even if its legal effect may not extend beyond the medium- or even short-term, it has historical value. For one, it is the first time the Supreme Court has interpreted or even mentioned a very important statute for the Internet, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. For two, it shows how the Supreme Court, or at least one justice of it (nobody else joined this "statement"), is inclined to interpret section 230 should a case revolving around it ever come before the Court.

When a judge interprets a law, he will of course first look to the plain meaning of the text. If the plain meaning supplies no clear meaning or a clearly absurd one, he will then look to the purpose of the legislature in enacting the law.

So first, a brief discussion of the Communications Decency Act, with a view to its purpose. In the early 1990s, the Internet had been opened to commercial use, and massive growth began as entrepreneurs decided to make their pot of gold by colonizing it. The Religious Right being very much in power at the time, they were afraid that there would be content on the Internet that would corrupt "good morals". That's why the Communications Decency Act is called this: to make it illegal to transmit "indecent" content on the Internet, even if the Supreme Court had found it otherwise protected by the First Amendment.

Most state codes have provisions stating that headings of sections are not part of the law and shouldn't be used to interpret laws. The US Code is different in that section "catchlines" and "analyses" (what it calls headings and tables of contents) are part of the law. So in some cases you'll have tables of contents that don't match up with the actual headings, and the people who update the US Code are powerless to fix it, because only Congress can change them to fit. What I'm getting with this is that section headings can be used to find out what Congress meant in the sections they head.