Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
What makes it civil disobedience is a moral judgement about the legality.
Suppose someone in Russia illegally downloads the full text of one of the books mentioned here as being bowdlerized, due to censorship, in the editions sold there:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/wo...sent.html?_r=0
I'd call that download civil disobedience, even if the downloader didn't pay. This is especially true because the downloader couldn't pay, at least not without risk of a knock on the door.
Now, if an American, in the US, downloaded the same book, without paying, and not from a legitimized library, I'd call it stealing.
What about downloading, from openlibrary.org, a low-quality misscanned EPUB of Goldfinger by Ian Fleming (1908 - 1964), a book which is public domain in China, Japan, and Canada, but not in the US? I don't see it as rising, or declining, to the moral level of stealing from the rights holder (Amazon) if I did it. But it's not a morally superior act for Americans to do it, and thus couldn't be, to me, civil disobedience. |
But that is the whole point of civil disobedience. It is a
moral judgment. Morality is subjective.
For one thing, clearly the lawmakers disagreed about the morality.
So... who are you to question someone else's moral judgment?
Civil disobedience is the kind of thing where one breaks the law, in order to raise public awareness of your (and usually numerous others') belief that the law is wrong.
If someone engages in civil disobedience in the ebook world, in order to, for example, protest against the state of current copyright laws, are you going to deny them the right to even qualify as a form of civil disobedience,
just because you don't agree?
Now I grant you that civil disobedience is not a magic get-out-of-jail-free card for excusing anything anyone wants to do.
That is why, very often, people suffer for the sake of civil disobedience. Depending on the situation, they may face legal prosecution, or be hunted by death squads.
Civil disobedience is something that is measured by
the other person's conviction, not yours, as well as by said other person's willingness to put their neck on the line for their beliefs.