[jrockway]

If I were to threaten to murder you, you wouldn't expect the police to say "Eh, nothing we can do, he's got a right to free speech. Call us back after he shoots you, you'll have a case then."

This is the problem with thought experiments regarding crime: they always make the facts 100% certain, when in real life, the facts are never 100% certain. If we were to rephrase your thought experiment, it would be:

"Some guy said some other guy was going to kill him. Let's throw that some other guy in prison for a while, just in case."

Not quite as clear-cut as you think, is it?

[PhasmaFelis]

"Not quite as clear-cut as you think, is it?"

Weev did literally threaten to murder Kathy Sierra, and he then bragged about doing so on multiple public websites. So, yes, it is quite clear-cut.

(And, please, at least think for a minute before you try to rebut by saying that he didn't mean it, so it shouldn't count.)

[jrockway]

Were you at the keyboard when he was typing this message?

[PhasmaFelis]

Why, you're right. I don't know for sure that the NSA didn't fake dozens of threatening emails from Weev, and several forum posts, and then used mind-control satellites to keep him from posting that it wasn't him or telling any of his meatspace friends that it wasn't him, and then used mind-control satellites again to make him brag in person to that reporter. Oooh, or maybe they used mind-control satellites on the reporter to make him slander Weev's good name, and MCS once more to keep all the people in the article from revealing the truth!

Give it up, man. The guy whose image you're trying to clean prefers it nice and dirty.

[tedunangst]

If only there were some way to determine what was meant. Barring that, maybe it's best not go around saying such things if you can't even convince one out of twelve people that you weren't serious.

Regardless of whether you truly intend to carry out the threat, the threat itself is a form of violence. It imposes your will on an unwilling subject.

If you rob a bank with an unloaded gun, you can't claim afterwards, "oh, they were perfectly safe and didn't actually have to give me the money, so therefore it wasn't a crime."

[jrockway]

No, you missed my point. My point is that anyone can accuse anyone of a crime, so the law has to reduce the incentive for someone to make something up to get attention or revenge. "He said he would kill me," is nearly impossible to prove, so if you punish it severely, you create a cure that's worse than the disease. If you restrict it to certified letters, though, then you have a better balance.

[tedunangst]

Don't we already have laws against filing a false report? I think I agree with you, but I'm not sure that the problem you described exists.