[NTLK] h*cks, kr*ks, SN

[Lord Groundhog]

~~~ On 2010/01/18 18:26, Jim Lee at jimlee at centurytel.net wrote ~~~

> 
> On Jan 18, 2010, at 6:41 AM, Lord Groundhog wrote:
> 
>>   What we have now is law:  very imperfect perhaps, very
>> frustrating for certain, but reasonably clear about what it actually
>> says.
>> 
>> 
> 
> Pardon me for muddling the point, but the law of *which* land?  How
> many countries are represented by the members of this list?  Is there
> a universal law that applies to ALL of them, or do they conflict with
> each other?  And to further the point, sometimes laws are just plain
> silly and wrong, passed out of greed or coercion.  Does that give me
> the right to break them?  Sometimes, yes - it's called civil
> disobedience; doing what's CORRECT rather than what's LEGAL.  Of
> course, the person in question also bears the responsibility of taking
> the consequences for his actions, but I'm tired of hearing the "law"
> bandied about as if it were the final word.
> 

I don't think you're muddling anything; you're highlighting an issue that
goes back to the year dot.  I reckon there's always been conflict between
what's legal and what's right.

If you're one of the few people who read the documentation that comes with
software nowadays (it sometimes seems to be larger than the manual itself)
you'll know about the reams of legal and quasi-legal conditions of use
accompanying the software, and since this documentation is often part of the
installation process now, you even have to click an "I agree" button before
you can finish the installation.   I suppose one could (and should) argue
about the legal and ethical force of this documentation but at the very
least, it has the force of a contract.  And in any case copyright law is
increasingly the subject of work to make it international.

The law is NOT the final word -- and yet in another way it is.  The same
body of laws that "unfairly"(?) keep us from using this or that bit of
dormant software keep someone else from breaking into our homes, declaring
"property is theft!" and relieving us of our property.  We have laws because
the cohesiveness of society seems to need to acknowledge that we all can
behave very selfishly and very badly indeed from time to time, and we all
need to be reminded to play nicely together.  (We also have laws because
some people have figured out how to work the system to create stupid laws
that protect their self-interest, and that's part of the problem isn't it?)
The law is the final word *until we change it*, using the means built into
the system to make those changes.


Yes, sometimes the law needs to be opposed outright.  But that isn't
something to be done lightly.  And as a veteran of the civil rights movement
and the 1960s peace movement, I'm glad to hear you include the
responsibility of the person carrying out civil disobedience to take the
consequences for his/her actions.  But as was made clear to us by people
like Martin Luther King, civil disobedience ought to be reserved for when
existing laws result in genuinely significant breaches of natural justice
and moral decency.  Civil disobedience is something to be taken seriously
because it contravenes the underpinnings of society by undermining the
principle of respect for law, and it is not to be used lightly or everytime
some law annoys us.  We also learned to see civil disobedience as something
done with deliberate calculation and a cool head; in my experience it wasn't
unusual for demonstration marshalls to ask someone to skip a demonstration
if they were so angry that they couldn't be relied on to stay cool under
attack (and yes, the police and others did attack).  Civil disobedience done
in the style of a Gandhi or a King is a moral force, exercised as the last
line of defence of a moral principle.  You talk of consequences; real civil
disobedience has meant pain, arrests, beatings, trumped up charges,
bloodshed and death, and to me that puts it on a level above the trivial.  I
can't help feeling that bringing it into this debate cheapens it.

For the life of me I cannot bend my mind into a shape that lets me see
software cracking as equivalent to defying the segregation laws that
deprived millions of people of every kind of human and civil right from
voting and equal education to where they sat in a bus or at a lunch counter.
And I cannot accept a parallel between OTOH being sued for copyright
violation, and OTOH being denied human and civil rights, being beaten and
targetted with fire hoses, being hung and then set alight or being taken out
into a field and executed, for being the "wrong" colour or for being a
"n_____-lover", as the phrase was.

Do I want the use of software that's being abandoned anyway?  Yes.  Am I
willing to talk about it as if I were being denied the use of a water
fountain as the people who make racist laws?  No.  Please.  I know we all
are trying to make sense out of this difficult situation but what are we
saying?  

Just my slant.  Sorry I take it personally.


 
Shalom. 
Christian 

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

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