Nelson Pavlosky wrote:
> Actually, that's a good question, Fred. Conley said that he opposes
> civil disobedience, but he did not mention specific examples of people
> supporting civil disobedience within SFC.
>
> Conley?
I don't have specifics for you, other than something on the Scrabulous
thread ("I with the developers would release the source code so we could
to a mass civil disobedience" -- I'm actually not sure what this
sentence means, spelling aside...what would be civil disobedience
here?). I just know I've heard it highly spoken of often in #freeculture.
>
> Generally I would agree with Fred that until people are getting
> arrested, civil disobedience is not appropriate... but I would make
> significant exceptions. For example, in the Diebold memos example, if
> publishing the memos had not been fair use, people posting the memos
> probably would not have been subject to jail time, but they might have
> been subject to significant copyright damages. I still would have
> supported it as a civil disobedience.
I would not have. I think that the rebellion against authority is only
be justified when authority is causing you to do something immoral or
taking someone's life. I don't expect any of you to agree with me.
>
> Another example of civil disobedience which I might support even if the
> stakes are low is the banning of DeCSS and its ilk. After DeCSS was
> ruled to be illegal to publish I may have technically broken the law by
> writing a giant prime number on the sidewalk which, when parsed by an
> unzipping program, would uncompress to be the DeCSS code. See a picture
> of this at <http://www.flickr.com/photos/skyfaller/129082487/>... Luke
> and I actually met Asheesh when he walked into one of us chalking the
> number. The prospect of people being fined for writing songs like "Oh
> Nine, Eff Nine" <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9HaNbsIfp0> (for the
> AACS processing key to crack HD-DVDs) or for wearing a tie with the
> DeCSS code on it is vaguely hilarious and also great for calling
> attention to the problems with this attack on freedom of speech.
I agree that it was a terrible ruling, but I stand by my belief.
>
> There have also been a few examples of people actually going to jail for
> free culture-related reasons, such as Dmitry Sklyarov, whose
> imprisonment inspired Derek Slater:
> <http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2005/07/eff15-day-i-became-copyfighter>.
> I'm not sure Dmitry intended his action to be civil disobedience, he was
> probably just surprised when he was arrested while presenting research
> at a conference in the United States, instead of the expected scenario
> of a researcher being arrested in the Soviet Union. Still, if that had
> been civil disobedience instead of an accident, I probably would have
> still supported Dmitry.
>
> Peace,
> ~Nelson~
>
> Fred Benenson wrote:
>> Wait, who said what about civil disobedience?
>>
>> And until people start getting arrested, I don't think we're there yet.
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 12:18 AM, Nelson Pavlosky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:
>>
>>
>>> There are definitely situations in which civil disobedience could be
>>> justified and even required, although such situations are much less
>>> common in the field of free culture than in the field of, say, civil
>>> rights.
>>>
>>> The event that lead directly to the founding of SFC, the Diebold case,
>>> included a civil disobedience component, although it was not one that
>>> Luke and I directly participated in. There were these memos that
>>> detailed possible problems with the voting machines which are the
>>> backbone of our democracy, and Diebold was trying to suppress that
>>> information. Luke and I took the legal route, fighting it in the
>>> courts, but our allies didn't want to count on the courts making the
>>> right call when democracy itself was on the line: they wanted to make
>>> sure the public got the information it needed one way or the other.
>>> They organized a system of mirrors on college campuses, including people
>>> like Asheesh Laroia and many of our earliest SFC recruits, to make sure
>>> the Diebold memos stayed available. Diebold had to play whack-a-mole,
>>> sending takedown notices to each campus, but once the mirrors on one
>>> campus were shut down, the memos just popped up on another campus.
>>>
>>> It actually turned out that the court agreed with us that hosting the
>>> Diebold memos was legal and a fair use. Therefore the "electronic civil
>>> disobedience" campaign had been arguably legal the whole time, and not
>>> actually civil disobedience. However, if the court had ruled the other
>>> way, the mirrors would have continued to host the Diebold memos and
>>> ensure public knowledge of possible flaws with our elections, even if it
>>> had been judged to be against the law. And I would have supported them
>>> in that action 100%, even if I were unable to participate myself due to
>>> legal reasons (I would have wanted to keep my hands "clean" during the
>>> appeals process, presumably). Sometimes the law is wrong, and when the
>>> stakes are high enough, it is best to break the law, accepting the legal
>>> consequences for your actions.
>>>
>>> I am not saying that SFC should necessarily ever officially organize a
>>> campaign involving civil disobedience. That's a question for the
>>> lawyers, as to what is legally possible or what is legally most
>>> damaging, and an ethical question of whether it would be better to let
>>> the organization shoulder the consequences for a civil disobedience
>>> action, or to let the individuals hang separately. However, I can
>>> easily imagine another situation where civil disobedience would be
>>> justified and necessary, just like the Diebold case if the court had
>>> ruled the other way, and it would be a discussion worth having as to
>>> what SFC's responsibilities are given our mission, our resources and our
>>> constituents, and whether SFC should knowingly break an unjust law.
>>>
>>> Peace,
>>> ~Nelson Pavlosky~
>>>
>>> Clifford Conley Owens III wrote:
>>>
>>>> I hear a lot of people in this organization speak very highly of civil
>>>> disobedience, and it seems like some of us are just waiting for an
>>>> opportunity to justify breaking the law and sticking it to "the man." I
>>>> suppose I could right a very long-winded article on why I think civil
>>>> disobedience is a bad idea, but I'm not much of a writer, so I'll just
>>>> say a few things that come to mind.
>>>>
>>>> One example that often comes up is piracy, but I feel that that helps
>>>> out the mpaa/riaa far more than just boycotting it all together. I
>>>> suppose most of you don't know this, but I used to be on the far other
>>>> side of this discussion (about copyright/culture). I remember arguing
>>>> about copyright and piracy with someone in a philosophy class in high
>>>> school (and imagine me talking like a 16-year-old version of Dan
>>>> Glickman). I thought that everyone who disagreed with me was being
>>>> immature. How ironic that over four years later I became a grad student
>>>> and the person I was arguing with was one of my first chapter members.
>>>> But the thing is, I *still* think that all the people in the room who
>>>> disagreed were being immature! It wasn't until I discovered
>>>> *constructive* solutions like the FSF and CC that I really changed my
>>>> mind about things.
>>>>
>>>> I'm open for discussion, but if this organization ever plans a civil
>>>> disobedience event, you can count me out of the event, and possibly out
>>>> of the organization.
>>>>
>>>> ~Conley
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Discuss mailing list
>>>> [email protected]
>>>> http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>>>
>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Discuss mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>>
>>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Discuss mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
--
office: Torgersen 3180
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
cell: (540) 597-8820
xmpp: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
aim: vtconley
sip: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
