Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 146 points –
Cali Autopilot case violates free speech rights, says Tesla
theregister.com

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights::Elon's biz claims 1st Amendment rights

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"My right to free speech should extend to the right for my company to tell lies" is quite the statement, but let's see how that goes.

It unfortunately worked well for FOX in court most of the time.

Isn’t this different because there are specifically truth-in-advertising laws? Not even a natural person is immune to truth-in-advertising laws. So it seems like Tesla is making a despirate move.

It looks like their main argument is that the state had the last 10 years to object and only now did so and therefore imply that it was reasonable to infer that because the state didn't raise objections in that time, that Tesla shouldn't be found guilty of false advertising.

Unfortunately a corporation is a person. Worse yet is when they are a very rich person with actual product and capital.

Caption: "He did it!"

ManPointingtoLegalDocumentAknowledgingCreationofaCorporateEntity.jpg

who wouldn’t want to exercise their free speech right to run over pedestrians?

That's not what Tesla is doing though, or the article is about...they (Tesla) are arguing that free speech should allow them to do false advertising of their product.

should allow them to do false advertising

The whole advertising industry would go down the drain if this were an actual right.

It pretty much already is...it's not a coincidence that people in marketing and sales are considered the least trustworthy.

It pretty much already is.

I would rather say there are many small (hopefully) violations that go unpunished.

That's something else than a right, and this subtle difference counts a lot.

Typical behavior from a far right turd. It's always everyone else wrong, never them.

It’s a company’s overpowered lawyers abusing the legal system. I don’t think Turd had any say in their legal defense.

There is plenty to be annoyed and disappointed with in the American legal system, high powered lawyers’ abuse of it, and the general idea that corporations are people, though.

It's his "culture" that we're looking at here though, so I'd argue that we're both correct.

Citizens United. Corporations have the right to free speech, the precedent has been set. We are fuuuuuucked.

You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Tesla's truthful and non-misleading speech about its vehicles and their features,"

I wonder when and where THIS might have happened.. :-)

Musk and billionaire associates have normalized stupidity as logical argument.

Tesla elon musk says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

This is the best summary I could come up with:


It may have taken more than a year, but Tesla has finally responded to the California Department of Motor Vehicles allegations that it misrepresented Autopilot's capabilities, arguing that it's free to do so under the US Constitution.

In a document [PDF] filed with California's Office of Administrative Hearings last week lawyers representing Elon Musk's electric car company didn't directly challenge the DMV's specific allegations that Tesla may have overblown Autopilot's autonomy, marketing it less as an advanced driver assist system (ADAS) and more of a full self-driving platform.

It's not clear whether the "truthful and non-misleading speech" refers to Autopilot's capabilities, which the biz doesn't otherwise defend in its rebuttal.

The DMV's actions violate that right because the case is before an administrative law judge and not a panel of citizens, the lawyers argue.

Tesla also claims that the DMV has no right to prosecute it for false advertising of Autopilot's capabilities because it knew perfectly well how the company had been describing it, but didn't take action before.

Additionally, Tesla said that California opted to remove the terms "self-driving," "automated," and "auto-pilot," from the state's Statement About Autonomous Technology regulation, meaning there's no prohibition against using such language in an advertisement.


The original article contains 570 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 65%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

In addition to its first amendment argument, Tesla also said that the California DMV is violating its rights to have a jury trial, under the US Constitution's 7th Amendment and Article I, Section 16 of California's Constitution, both of which cover rights to trial by a jury.

Yikes. What does a jury of Tesla’s peers look like? Representatives from 12 other giant corporations?