The outcome of a legal battle in the US state of Arizona, over the First Amendment and a state law on data protection and sharing by car dealers, could eventually have much broader implications, including on such issues like initiatives to introduce encryption-breaking backdoors.
At the very least, its outcome could provide another building block in the effort to bring more legal clarity to the status of computer code in terms of First Amendment's free speech protections, particularly the doctrine prohibiting compelled speech.
More specifically, this concerns government-mandated creation of new code, the legality of which is currently unresolved. (Several rulings back in the 1990s said source code itself is protected speech, as companies attempted to lift a US ban on export of some types of software, including cryptographic.)
Meanwhile, the state legislation that sparked the controversy - but also interest in how its outcome might serve to set a legal precedent - is the Dealer Data Security Law of 2019, which requires car dealers in Arizona to make changes to their Deal Management Systems (DMS).
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