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Posted by bilsbie 11/9/2025

Montana becomes first state to enshrine 'right to compute' into law(montananewsroom.com)
541 points | 330 commentspage 2
culi 11/9/2025|
Montana, which has the 4th largest population of millionaires despite being the 7th lowest populated US state, passes a law to prevent AI regulation. I don't think that it's a coincidence that many of the wealthy individuals that have flocked to Montana made their wealth in the tech industry
cheesecompiler 11/10/2025|
Why have they flocked to Montana? I had no idea.
arrowleaf 11/10/2025|||
Abundance of natural beauty and recreation opportunities
herewulf 11/11/2025|||
To maintain an appreciable distance from the plebes.
londons_explore 11/9/2025||
I'm not sure exactly what this law does, but I would like to do with a computer anything I could theoretically and legally do with my mind.

Eg. If I'm a shopkeeper and see some customer coming in who stole stuff from the shop last time, I am within my rights to tell them to leave the shop.

However if I use a computer to do the same, many countries would disallow facial recognition, keeping databases of customers without consent, etc.

jstanley 11/9/2025|
OK, but be careful what you wish for. We might get regulations on allowable thought if that's what's necessary to regulate computation.
cushychicken 11/9/2025||
Oh wow, Greg Gianforte managed to do something in politics I don’t vehemently hate.

He’s not a very nice person but he did at least used to own a tech company.

RRWagner 11/9/2025||
I used to do presentations at educational technology conferences and many (30+)years ago I speculated that "in the future" computers that could create would be licensed. This was based on the observation that every significant past technology under user control was eventually licensed for permission to operate - radio, television, cars, the list is long.
PunchyHamster 11/9/2025|
you need better examples than radio/tv/cars

radio/tv share the bands which are very narrow resource so licensing pretty much have to exist else there would be interference abound (imagine competing TV station just driving around with a jammer on competition

cars have that + the fact infrastructure is built by public money. Allowing anyone on anything with no training there literally costs lives

Or, copyright wise, to earn money in before digital world you kinda had to not have too much of copyright infringement - while artist today might get popular enough to subside on patreon/other form of digital tips, before it wouldn't be possible

Spivak 11/10/2025||
This doesn't really disagree with the parent's thesis. You're just giving the long explanation for each event.

Any significant technological advancement necessarily uses some shared public resource which will drive people to regulate it. For AI folks are trying to get a lot of random things to stick: the power grid, water usage, public safety, disinformation.

colingauvin 11/9/2025||
>Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety.

....what does this say about DRM enforcement?

nayuki 11/9/2025||
Exactly. I was hoping that this law would be the pushback to the overzealous prosecution of DeCSS, people who defeat DRM locks in order to lawfully back up the multimedia data that they already paid for, etc.

Somewhat related: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Read

I also wonder what the impact of the law is on TPM chips on computers (restricting your ability to boot whatever OS you want), the locked-down iOS mobile app store, etc.

sweetjuly 11/9/2025|||
Most of the laws which touch on DRM are federal, and so they override any state laws due to the supremacy clause.
derbOac 11/9/2025||
I admit I'm not knowledgeable about this law but as it's written it seems fairly meaningless to me, as it could be interpreted in many different ways, and the exclusion is a hole you could drive a metaphorical truck through.
seneca 11/9/2025||
Here's the actual text of the law: https://legiscan.com/MT/text/SB212/id/3078731
superkuh 11/9/2025|
It's hilarious that the text of this law is blocked behind an impassible cloudflare computational paywall.
fHr 11/9/2025|||
I don't get it, accessing this from EU no issue
terminalshort 11/9/2025|||
So impassible that I didn't even see it
kragen 11/10/2025|||
What homelessness problem? I have a house, don't I?
superkuh 11/11/2025|||
Yep. Use a modern corporate browser and you'll have no problems personally (or so I assume from everyone saying so, I don't use chrome). Use anything else (ie, not-modern corp browser like FF pre-XUL death or some modern non-corporate browser) and you'll get blocked. I'm still getting blocked, btw. And it is cloudflare's block page. And it happens from my residential (comcast) IPv4 and multiple test IPv4 from other netblocks.

It is real. People are being blocked. Even if you aren't.

perihelions 11/9/2025||
The major context of this law is regulations like Executive Order 14110, of 2023 (since rescinded),

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14110

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38067314 ("Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (whitehouse.gov)"—337 comments)

lr4444lr 11/9/2025||
It's a nice gesture, but I'm not sure it will matter. AI is likely already on the Federal radar for superseding regulation.
eikenberry 11/9/2025|
As long as laws are restricted to business services it shouldn't conflict. This is the right for citizens to use computation, business regulation is always a layer on top of that.
dboreham 11/9/2025||
Um. Montana resident here. The state also had quite strong anti-corruption (aka campaign finance) laws, since the copper baron days. But the US Supreme Court ruled that doesn't matter (because their corruption trumps any state anti-corruption law presumably). So don't expect this to amount to anything.
righthand 11/9/2025|
Here is the official text: https://bills.legmt.gov/#/laws/bill/2/LC0292?open_tab=bill
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