Is there a sale or not? If there's not a sale it's not advertising. If it's not advertising it should be allowed, false or not. If it is advertising it's not just speech. You lack the consistency to make your argument work. So again, I guess you're fine with arresting people over light bulbs.

> If there's not a sale it's not advertising.

This is a really strange perspective. Advertising is only advertising once the advertised product is sold? A billboard is simultaneously an advertisement and not an advertisement depending on whether the observer has purchased the advertised item?

Not the GP but no, I'm not fine with arresting people over light bulbs. I am totally cool with arresting them for fraud if it meets that standard. I am also cool with the business being fined or otherwise sanctioned for false advertisement. The product is beside the point. The deception is what the punishment is intended to address.

There’s an implicit conversion between intent to sell and actually selling. For there to be advertising, one of the two has to be true. If I’m showing off my car, am I advertising anything?

Strictly, yes..

If you show off your car you are indeed, by definition advertising it.

I know that's not the definition youre referring to, but the word does mean to call attention to, especially in a boastful or ostentatious manner.

But anyway, it's still advertising because the car has the manufacturers badges, it's just not first order commercial advertising.

If nobody has purchased the product, there is no way to evaluate whether the advertising is false, because there is no product to compare against the claims.

If I write in this comment that I will sell you a perpetual motion machine for $5, but I don't actually have one and I never attempt to take your money, am I guilty of a crime?

> If there's not a sale it's not advertising.

I just can't anymore with HN. Who are these people who are redefining common terms to suit their own views?

What am I redefining? Can you point me to an example of advertising without the intent to sell?

You've introduced this 'intent to sell' bit when for most of the thread you were requiring the transaction to proceed to a sale before the advertising can be advertising.

No one has claimed anything about advertising without the intent to sell. Indeed, that's been everyone's point since this bit of the thread started with michaelt's comment. Commercial speech is an area were most people agree that some constraints are useful. Hence it was used as an example of why censorship is nuanced not binary. People have different standards for what's reasonable and what's not, but only the most die hard free speech advocates would not have a standard at all.

You have frequently taken examples that are clearly in the advertising with intent to sell context and treated them as if they apply in a non-commercial context. This is how we get to you accusing people of being OK with arresting people over light bulbs when they're actually saying they're OK with laws against fraudulent advertising.

As I said in another comment, there’s a conversion between intent to sell and actually selling. The same way if you were against murder you’d implicitly be against conspiring to murder.

If you are selling or intending to sell something, and you choose to have it mediated by the government, whether or not you’re allowed to falsely advertise something has nothing to do with freedom of speech. We aren’t agreeing that censorship is allowed. Censorship isn’t voluntary.

But now YOU are deciding that “if a sale is involved, speech can be restricted.”

Why can I not decide “if it would result in people dying, speech can be restricted?”

I mean, if you told me I could only restrict one of these, then surely I would pick the second anyways.

No, I’m saying that if you decide to make a sale, and decide to have it mediated by the government by paying sales tax, then whether or not you get punished for false advertising has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Whether such taxes are voluntary in the first place is a different argument, but I think they should be. So there’s no inconsistency on my side.

It sounds like you have replaced a moral framework with a legal one. But the question of censorship is fundamentally a question of morality. It matters not how legal or illegal specific actions are in this discussion, so the legal means of enforcement that you rely on for your argument are a red herring.

Then you heard incorrectly. What I said is what I believe to be moral. You can’t arrest someone over non violent speech. Force is only justified in response to force. And at the same time, if you agree to enforcement you aren’t getting your rights violated.

Neither "enforcement" nor "arrest" carries moral content. But you use both terms freely in justifying your allegedly-moral position, unfortunately implying your conception of "rights" is one based only on those granted by an enforcement body.

It is hard to discern any moral content here, and I suspect there is none.

What? If I’m morally against using force to prevent non-forceful speech, why would that not also be my legal position?

Isn't the crime of false advertising in the failure to deliver what was claimed, and not the claim itself? You can very well falsely advertise your product however you like provided you don't actually sell it to anyone, because once you deliver them a product that isn't what you claimed, that's when the actual crime occurs.

> You can very well falsely advertise your product however you like provided you don't actually sell it to anyone, because once you deliver them a product that isn't what you claimed, that's when the actual crime occurs.

Is this the legal precedent or intuition? I'm cynical and am guessing that the advertisement is illegal as long as it presents in a commercial way, regardless of whether a sale had happened. Anyone know?