Clifford Conley Owens III wrote: > Nelson Pavlosky wrote: > >> 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. >> > I'm thinking this through. You could make noise without showing the > emails.
You can, but your warnings will have no teeth. You need the evidence to convince people that you're not just a crazy alarmist conspiracy theorist, and the Diebold memos were that evidence. I gave my talk at your school, you know exactly why we had to share the Diebold memos in their entirety. Individual quotes could be shrugged off as taken out of context or fabricated, but the whole corpus of e-mails is difficult to write off. More importantly, there was no way Luke and I could have read the entire archives ourselves, and even if we did we would not have been able to find everything interesting or incriminating in the archives. Only by open-sourcing the investigation could we find the evidence necessary to e.g. get the California government to sue Diebold the way it did. If we were even banned from sharing quotes or smaller selections, then it should be obvious that this would cripple any attempt to warn the public about the voting problems. > You can talk about the constitution, but I don't think it's > some inherent right written in the heart of the universe. > It's not an inherent right written in the heart of the universe, but neither are the "rights" of authority. Men created the government's authority, and men can dismantle the government's authority. The Constitution is the source of the government's authority, and when the government oversteps the bounds of that grant of authority, then it may be appropriate to violate the lesser law to defend the greater law, the greater law being the Constitution. If (1) and (2) are constitutional issues, then the Constitution may be a valid reason to post the Diebold memos even if it were to violate copyright law. The Constitution is the social contract by which we cede our individual power to the government, and when the government breaks that contract it may be appropriate to take that power back into our own hands. > Once again, I don't expect anyone to agree with me, but I think there > would have to be something far more important than any free culture > value being threatened to warrant civil disobedience. Issue (1) might be a free culture issue more than anything else (even if I do think the constitution is involved) but (2) and (3) are clearly more important than most of the issues that free culture usually deals with, which is why the Diebold case was something of a perfect storm. It's one thing when copyright is being abused, that's just something that free culture geeks get excited about. But when copyright is abused to silence essential political speech about the voting process which underpins our democracy, that's something everyone should get excited about, and everybody did, that's why it was in the New York Times etc. If you don't think the 1st Amendment + freedom of speech is important, and you don't think it's important whether elections are rigged and democracy is a sham, then I'd like to know what you think *is* important short of mass murder. (Hint: the end of freedom of speech and the end of democracy could easily lead to the latter.) Peace, ~Nelson~ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
