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This raises the age-old debate about what is good / right vs. what is legal, and how they are not usually the same thing. Without going full Godwin's Law here:
by candu 9y ago
This raises the age-old debate about what is good / right vs. what is legal, and how they are not usually the same thing.
Without going full Godwin's Law here: history is full of cases where "following the laws" has led to systems and behavior that most people would now consider appalling. I personally think it is always reasonable to ask: at what point does following the law itself become immoral?
There's no clear answer to this, of course. Chinese censorship and DMCA takedown requests fall far short of genocide, slavery, war atrocities, etc. on the "yeah, let's not do this" scale. Censorship sits in a murky area of ethics / morality. After all: we censor things like child pornography that we consider to be morally offensive, and most Western democracies have much stronger hate speech laws than the US. (There's a similar "murky area" line of reasoning around DMCA takedown requests: what about fair use? What is lost when regulatory capture prevents materials from entering the public domain on any kind of reasonable time scale? etc.)