Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
I'm not questioning that there are unfair/unjust laws; but "civil disobedience" is something that is saved for serious offenses. We're talking about ebooks, and let's face it... there's nothing serious about them. You buy or you don't... end of issue. There is simply no call to apply "civil disobedience" to ebooks.
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Only big, life-altering laws can be unjust?
I'd say that "the future of the concept of literary heritage" is a reasonable concept to commit civil disobedience over. If the current model is allowed to grow unchecked, publishers will establish 1 purchase = 1 reader and destroy literary culture as we know it.
I don't think that'll happen, in part because I don't think people will tolerate the restrictions publishers want to put on ebooks. Copies will never be harder to make than they are right now, and files will continue to be shared. If something massively internet-killing like SOPA gets passed, they'll be handed around on flash drives and discs; it is far, far too late to make file sharing too difficult for the average internet user.
I'll grant that most people doing filesharing aren't thinking of it as civil disobedience. Part of this is because the laws involved were developed as obscure matters of business contracting; until a few decades ago, the average person barely knew copyright law existed, and would have no idea how to break it. And today, the laws involved
make no sense; there's no way to know how much is too much to share, and the TOS phrasings often insist that copyright law prevents you from sharing your purchase with anyone, which is false. (Copyright law prevents you from making copies. It doesn't prevent you from allowing someone else to read a book on your reader.)
However, not all forms of civil disobedience are matters of conscious ethical choice and weighing the value to society of the laws in question vs the costs of enforcement. Some civil disobedience is just a lot of people deciding "that's a stupid law; I'm going to ignore it." And if it doesn't get enforced, that shows that society doesn't really value that law.
I'll take seriously the "problem of piracy" when the government takes seriously the problem of spam email--which *does* cost notable amounts of money. The idea that kids sharing their favorite songs is more dangerous to our society than tens of billions of dollars worth of time every year spent dealing with unwanted unsolicited email is ridiculous.