As with most things involving the 1st amendment right to free speech, you get a mixed blessing. Letting the KKK run around in their garb troweling their bigotry by the metric ton has generally not been a 'win' for me either. But being able to exchange ideas on the NSA matter on HN has been good.
We've gotten accustomed to freedom of speech when it comes to political matters, but we tolerate all sorts of restrictions in commerce. The SEC has basically said in the past that if you are raising money and want to talk about it, you're only allowed to talk to certain people at certain times and not others. Same with direct to consumer advertising of drugs. The FDA was essentially saying that pharmaceutical companies could only talk to doctors about what they have on offer, not patients.
More recently (and less of a hot-button issue) the FDA got smacked down by an appeals court for their restrictions on what pharma sales people could tell doctors about off-label use of drugs (that is, drugs used in a manner not approved by the FDA). The FDA has said in the past that it's illegal for sales reps to promote off-label uses of drugs to doctors. This is true even in cases where these off-label uses are written up in the medical literature. Note that it has never been against FDA regulations for anyone else to tell the doctors about off-label use of drugs (e.g. other doctors, the janitor, Hollywood celebrities, etc...). The courts have basically said that this is a first amendment violation because it places limits on specific individuals when society as a whole benefits from the free, unrestricted flow of truthful medical information.[1]
We've gotten accustomed to freedom of speech when it comes to political matters, but we tolerate all sorts of restrictions in commerce. The SEC has basically said in the past that if you are raising money and want to talk about it, you're only allowed to talk to certain people at certain times and not others. Same with direct to consumer advertising of drugs. The FDA was essentially saying that pharmaceutical companies could only talk to doctors about what they have on offer, not patients.
More recently (and less of a hot-button issue) the FDA got smacked down by an appeals court for their restrictions on what pharma sales people could tell doctors about off-label use of drugs (that is, drugs used in a manner not approved by the FDA). The FDA has said in the past that it's illegal for sales reps to promote off-label uses of drugs to doctors. This is true even in cases where these off-label uses are written up in the medical literature. Note that it has never been against FDA regulations for anyone else to tell the doctors about off-label use of drugs (e.g. other doctors, the janitor, Hollywood celebrities, etc...). The courts have basically said that this is a first amendment violation because it places limits on specific individuals when society as a whole benefits from the free, unrestricted flow of truthful medical information.[1]
[1]http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/04/us-offlabel-convic...