Clifford Conley Owens III wrote: > Nelson Pavlosky wrote: > >> 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.
I'm going to let everything else slide, because this is the example which I think is actually important. Do you really believe that it would be better to allow Diebold to (1) abuse copyright law for purposes it was not Constitutionally meant to serve, to (2) crush our first amendment rights to essential political speech, in order to (3) suppress information about problems with our elections which might allow them to be fixed or decided by random chance / computer errors.... than to oppose an unjust law and get the information to the public necessary to alert them to a threat to the core of our democracy? In that case I think that sitting silently while democracy itself fades away would be an immoral thing to do. I'm not sure you're thinking this through. Peace, ~Nelson~ P.S. Do you think the American Revolution was a just rebellion against authority? _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
