Apparently the California courts are looking into whether you have a First Amendment right to link to websites that facilitate the theft of intellectual property, and the business community is in an uproar. This subject fascinates me, although I haven’t dealt with it much in practice; I did my third year law school paper on “First Amendment Exclusionary Rules,” and they come up all the time. We have lots of rules (going back to common law causes of action for fraud and defamation) that impose restrictions on speech that is demonstrably false. But there are also a lot of areas of the law, nearly all of them fraught with uncertainty, that govern restrictions on truthful speech that conveys information that was obtained through some sort of illegality, from trade secret law to military intelligence to inside information about stocks. Our speech is not so free as we pretend, and in many cases there are good reasons why.