Typically that's part of belonging to a community.
Are you morally free to kill your guards if you are in prison through a failure of the judicial system? I don't think you are.
How about if you are in a death camp, where your government has not made a mistake, but is executing its legislatively determined plan of genocide? I think you are morally free to kill your guards in that case.
I also think you are morally free to rob a store for medical supplies during a natural disaster, but not morally free to rob a bank to pay for a relative's life-saving surgery.
When to break the law should be a conscious decision, consistent with some framework of ultimate costs and benefits to yourself, your society and beliefs, not merely opportunism or a universal refusal to ever defer to the rest of the community's decisions.
I'm not the OP, but here is my opinion. As a rule of thumb I don't support illegal activities. Why would I? Most of the laws I agree with, like no murder/rape/robbery. However some laws I'm against. Like the public drinking ban in Norway, why can't I have a beer by the lake?
And on the topic of media industries vs. file sharing. I haven't really made up my mind. Especially after the media industry brought tanks and fighter jets to a knife fight.
There are so many laws, I don't know how you could possibly say in an informed manner that you agree with most of them.
Making ethical decisions is easy for the majority of us, but our knowledge of the law is universally poor. I don't see why we should factor the law into discussions of ethics; it doesn't do anything to simplify the discussion.
> There are so many laws, I don't know how you could possibly say in an informed manner that you agree with most of them.
Oh, come on now. You can be informed on the ones that matter to you the most, and the ones which are most commonly broken, which says a lot about the society you live in. It's not that hard.
> I don't see why we should factor the law into discussions of ethics
Because laws, in many or most cases, reflect the moral or ethical views of a large number of people, or at least they did at the time they were passed. The fact that laws survived the lawmaking process at all means we should consider the thoughts that went into their creation. I'm not saying you should read every word of every statute. But a nation's laws are in many ways reflections of its cultural ethics.
The laws that "matter most" reflect ethics which are "no brainers". "Don't steal", "don't kill", "don't rape", etc.
These are ethical concepts that are easy to understand without resorting to consulting the law. The law in these cases is just an imperfect encoding of these obvious ethics. For the sake of governing, they work decently. However using them in an ethical discussion is using them for a purpose that they were not designed. There are so many better sources that we can look to in order to facilitate discussion.
Trying to use laws as a vehicle to discuss ethics is like examining Cheese Wiz to learn about dairy.
I support any activity that fits into my own set of moral rules.
Some activities are illegal but I support them because I don't see them as immoral. Other activities are perfectly legal but I don't support them because I see them as immoral.
I believe that, in general, supporting the law is good. Even in case of laws one deems silly. Even in a country where the lawmaking is somewhat corrupt.
Getting picky about which laws I obey would contribute towards social climate of not respecting the law in general. There are countries like that and their societies suffer as a result.
On the other hand for some laws the benefits of breaking them outweigh the above downsides.
The people who say that copyright laws are evil are generally the same people who say the laws that make DDOS attacks a felony are criminalizing "the digital equivalent of a sit-in"... but only when the DDOS is being carried out by people they agree with.
I can't speak for everyone, but when the US gov or the MPAA DDOS's a website they disagree with, I'm not angry because what they are doing is illegal, I'm angry about the hypocrisy in declaring something to be both legally and morally wrong, except when it serves their purposes.
I dislike illegal activities but I don't think many things around this is illegal. Note that TPB doesn't host any illegal copies, they doesn't distribute any either. The only illegal is the users themselfs.
1. copyright infringment, mainly a civil offense, that addresses speculatve monetary losses to
2. conspiracy to commit murder, a criminal offense with a history hundreds of years older than the notion of "copyright", that is aimed at preserving a human life?
How do you do that? That is an enormous leap. Is it some sort of mental gymnastics?
Is a human life more important than your "copyrighted work"?
Really bizarre thinking, or maybe it's just me.
I don't believe he was trying to make the two morally equivalent, just to say that there is a similar legal principle in question.
I think his point is that the same legal principle applies. TPB is clearly "in-league" with copyright violators. I will not weigh in on whether this is right or not, but it's obvious from their past behaviors (blog posts, etc.). They are guilty of "conspiracy to commit copyright violation".
My comment is not to do with TPB. My comment has to do with mixing legal principles (or more specifcally, areas of law) that are very different and do not mix well.
I disagree that "the same legal principle" applies, but then I'm not sure we have the same principles in mind. It sounds like you are thinking about the concept of conspiracy in general, or contributory infringement. But that's not what I was referring to.
In my mind, there is a clear delineation between what is criminal offence and involves bodily harm ("illegal") and what is simply an alleged violation of intellectual property or contractual rights (e.g. "alleged copyright infringment").
When someone jumps from one to the other, as the commenter did, it is very strange. Because to me they are two very different areas of law with their own distinct philosophical origins. That's why they are almost always separated into a criminal code and a civil code.
There are plenty of examples of conspiracy to commit civil offences. Ignoring them and using an example from criminal law, and in particular homicide, one of the most heinous of all crimes, seems unnecesary. It raises the suspicion that either the commenter is using this example merely for shock value or that his knowledge of the law is very narrow and not well-informed.
I agree with you, that is why I put "consipiracy to commit copyright infringment" in quotation marks. That's not a thing and I don't really have an opinion on whether it should be a thing.
I read you statement as you thinking he was making a moral equivlancy (conspiracy to commit murder was the same as aiding copyright infringement). My point was that he's not making a moral equivlancy, he's just pointing out that to say TBP is not culpable because they don't host the files on their servers is missing the point, at least missing the point as lawmakers might see it.
Correct: I purposely did not delve into any specifics, because I was simply trying to demonstrate that "I did not host the file or do the actual infringement" is really not a sufficiently complex argument to actually mean that you are not liable, and even if it means you are not liable under current law, I do not feel it is at all clear that in some larger ethical sense you shouldn't be liable, and I can sympathize with people who have campaigned to add such liability. And certainly, I did not attempt to argue "moral equivalence" between "murder" and "copyright infringement" (and feel that anyone who thinks I did, such as the guy who decided to hide behind the name "howcan", is just being argumentative: it serves no purpose in pushing forward a discussion and just drags down the conversation; you always need to draw parallels: that's how language works).
However, your statement "that's not a thing" is not entirely accurate: the DMCA's anti-tampering clause actually feels quite a bit like a law in the style of "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement". Specifically, it holds people who distribute tools that bypass protection mechanisms culpable, even if the primary use of that tool is not for copyright infringement (not so for the Pirate Bay), even if any and all marketing is for that positive use (not true for torrents: it is a rare torrent client that isn't marketing in a way that makes it clear "you could use this to infringe; in fact, here's a screenshot of another user doing so"), and even if there is a clear moderation effort and stance against piracy (again: certainly not the case with the Pirate Bay).
Of course, neither the Pirate Bay nor torrent clients are protection mechanisms, so AFAIK these laws would not and could not be used, and the DMCA is a US-specific law and these people aren't operating here, so I'm not trying to say they are already breaking this law (another reason to not go into specifics: they really aren't directly relevant, and it then requires this massive hedge to make certain people don't start arguing some nitpick of an example off into the weeds); however, it is a clear example of "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement" as a real law that has been used with real consequences in the real world in situations where people have committed not a single act of piracy.
Note: the closest I have ever gotten to being a lawyer was a role as the off-stage voice of the judge in a college performance of 12 Angry Men; what I know about this subject comes from running Cydia, the alternative to the App Store dealing in everything other than an App for jailbroken iPhones, which has had me deeply involved in the hearings to get DMCA exemptions. I thereby also watched with much interest the results of Sony's lawsuit against GeoHot, who happened to also have been the first person to unlock the iPhone and an instrumental player in various jailbreaks that were released, and his related-but-separate DMCA exemption that is currently going through hearings.
What that does mean, however, is that I'm on the other side of this: so if anyone (like "howcan") wants to make an argument that I'm somehow making some moral stance that contributing, even accidentally, to copyright infringement of others is as problematic as murder, I should really only have to go "seriously? you're argument is that I shouldn't call myself a murderer?". It also means, and I say this quite sadly, that I have a front-row seat to the effects of these laws: if you want to claim that these laws do not have any teeth, or do not take the overall stance that "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement" is a relevant idea, I thereby feel I need to ask how much experience you have in these matters.
It just seemed like a very extreme example to use to illustrate conspiracy. That's all. You're not the only one I've seen draw such extreme examples. I am being argumentative. But that's only because I think there's an argument worth making. Apologies for singling you out. I probably misinterpreted your comment and chose the wrong time to make my argument.
As long as we understand what "illegal" means and the difference between criminal and civil, I'm happy. I think it's to the benefit of all hackers to know the difference and choose their examples carefully. It matters what you as a hacker think and how you understand these things. If you do not see a clear separation between the civil and criminal, it makes the job easier for those who seek to blur the line to further their own interests.
Anyway, I apologise if I misinterpreted your comment and used it as an entry point for a little rant about the difference between civil and criminal. My bad.
This have nothing to do with bittorrent, the bittorrent protocol and torrents came long before people started sharing illegal copies of software. It's a great technology and it's actually meant to make downloads faster.
First of all, I would like you to read my comment to the other person who replied to me, because I did not state that anyone in this situation was actively guilty, only that the argument that people were not doing anything illegal solely because they did not actively do the act is overly simplistic (and in fact generally incorrect with regards to piracy, as my example from the other post shows, even if it is specifically correct for this example, although that would require some support). I will also ask you to please pay attention to who wrote the arguments you are responding to, as all language will be more easily understood if you know how to better decode the other person's statements.
However, you have now drawn a parallel to a different group of people (people who make clients, as opposed to people who build search engines), and I think the results there are more easy to see. For context, I run Cydia, the alternative to the App Store for jailbroken iPhones. We specialize (and in fact only really care about) software that is not an "App" (and thereby could not ever be submitted for sale in the App Store); however, as Apple rejects many apps, we tend to often get people coming to us with their submissions that they feel Apple should not have rejected from their store.
Many of these rejected products are torrent clients, and when they come to Cydia, we now blanket reject them as well. The reason is that the people who write these clients really are attempting to promote piracy in a way that the gun shop owner is not attempting to promote murder: the majority of their users are using them to pirate, they know that this is the case and are profiting directly off of the result, and prominently feature piracy in their marketing by showing screenshots of people pirating along with "see how easy it is?".
This latter point is very important: the firearm shop in your example was probably started by someone who either likes explosives, likes the history of war, likes hunting, or feels some need to protect himself and his community from the government or thieves or any other random threat; the person who owns the shop probably is not himself out killing people, he probably did not make the shop to make it easier for himself to get guns, and he probably did not build a business with the idea "most of the people I sell these guns to are murderers".
The result is that you don't see firearm shops that have giant signs on the front of their store with a picture of themselves killing someone as marketing for how simple and effective their guns are. When someone comes into their shop asking how to more effectively kill someone with their gun, they do not happily and cheerfully help them with their support issue. They also don't run community events (to draw a parallel to web forums) for people to mingle and discuss how much fun they have killing people.
However, this kind of thing is what happens when people start selling a torrent client: these two situations are quite obviously not the same situation, and yet I keep seeing this firearm example come up in defense of selling torrent clients as "if I can sell firearms that someone might use to murder someone, why can't I sell torrent clients that someone might use to commit copyright infringement". I seriously dare people to temporarily ignore the moral issues (as they are irrelevant for this specific discussion) and assume that murder and copyright infringement are equivalent crimes (alternatively, replace murder with something like "stealing candy from babies" or some other humorous and petty physical crime), and then think about how the mindsets and activities of these two actors can be discerned.
Regardless, the result is that you simply can't be successful selling a torrent client unless you pander to the pirates in your advertising and support because the pirates are nearly all of your user community; thereby, I found that without constant vigilance every torrent client I accepted ended up going down this path where I'd find the vendor's official Twitter account promoting piracy, the description on the products would keep ending up with more and more demonstrations of piracy, and I'd find out from users that they were specifically helping with piracy-related use cases via e-mail. Now, whether the law makes these people particularly "guilty" is another question: as someone whom these laws have occasionally threatened to smack down (and who has had friends actually get smacked), the position of Cydia is to simply not risk the result and reject the app (especially as you can always just host it yourself or with another party, and you can take payments for it yourself: it is a truly open ecosystem).
(Now, of course, I make this argument, and thanks to "howcan" and people like him, will have to add a giant hedge: nothing in this argument is trying to draw a parallel between the moral ramifications of taking a human life and copying a song; to the extent that you would like to have that argument you should not only have it somewhere else, but you should not have it with me, as the implication of taking that stance is that I am attempting to put myself in the "maybe I'm a murderer" category, which is both insulting and silly given what I do: it is the kind of argument that causes people who, in entirely well-meaning capacity, bring up an analogy from World War II, and then derail into "did you just call me a Nazi?!", when in fact nothing of the sort was implied by the relevant parts of the metaphor.)
