[...] An amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief deposed by a group of prominent American computer scientists, cryptographers and programmers argued their point:

It cannot seriously be argued that any form of computer code may be regulated without reference to First Amendment doctrine. The path from idea to human language to source code to object code is a continuum. As one moves from one to the other, the levels of precision and, arguably, abstraction increase, as does the level of training necessary to discern the idea from the expression. [...] But each for expresses the same idea, albeit in different ways. (Abelson et al. 2000)