Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
One way unjust laws are overturned, is by people refusing to obey them. Jury nullification is (in the U.S.) one of our legal ways of declaring "I don't care what legislators decided... I don't think this act should be punished."
If a law is consistently broken, and the courts can't get convictions for it, that indicates that society as a whole disagrees with the law, no matter how pretty its rhetoric, no matter how compelling businesses may find it.
And civil rights limitations are rarely fixed by changing laws; they are fixed by people refusing to abide by the restrictions placed on them by law. Free speech is a civil rights issue--copyright is not an ownership issue, but a monopoly-of-business issue. And while everyone I know agrees that authors/creators need some rights over their productions, that doesn't mean they agree on what those rights are, or that those rights include making the digital editions more limited than the physical ones.
Used books are a substantial market in the US. There's no reason used ebooks shouldn't also be permitted--or at least, that sharing them should not be permitted. There are technical issues involved in the copying--but those technical issues don't negate one's legal right to resell one's possessions. The focus should be on finding tech solutions to tech problems, not calling people "criminals" for doing what is legal with any other bit of their purchased property.
Format shifting, in the US, is legal. Slapping restrictions on that, and declaring that it's illegal to remove the restrictions, strikes most of us as ridiculous.
When laws are ridiculous, they are ignored, and eventually overturned. |
When was the last time a major law was overturned by jury nullification? When was the last time a judge explained that this is one of the options to a jury?
When was the last time a judge ruled that people could even
stand outside a courthouse handing out literature to prospective jurors explaining this right without fear of being arrested?
Yes, 'jury nullification' is every juror's right - but the current legal system does its very
best to ensure no juror EVER finds this out!
Derek