11 ms·
I don't support illegal activity, but I believe this is a quest of freedom, not for getting stuff free as in free beer.
by klrr 14y ago
I don't support illegal activity, but I believe this is a quest of freedom, not for getting stuff free as in free beer.
- duairc 14y agoWhy don't you support illegal activity?
- why-el 14y agoI don't know why you are downvoted. This is a valid question.
- hmottestad 14y agoI'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.
- jlgreco 14y agoThere 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.
- dandelany 14y ago> 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.
- jlgreco 14y agoThe 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.
- klrr 14y agoI 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.
- saurik 14y agoThe crime "conspiracy to commit murder" does not require you, personally, to actually kill someone, nor does it even require a death to occur.
- fein 14y agoA firearm shop will sell you the gun, but they won't pull the trigger for you. What about the torrent applications like uTorrent, Transmission, rTorrent, etc? Are they equally as guilty in your eyes?
- klrr 14y agoThis 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.
- TheAmazingIdiot 14y agoUmm, no. The very first bittorrent torrent was a 100 MB pirated porn video. I still have it. The client was a .py script. And it was hardcoded with said video.
- klrr 14y agoOf course "warez" and such appeared earlier, but it ws far from being so mainstream. And I'm still correct about the first purpose of the protocol.
- albedoa 14y ago
- rz2k 14y agoTypically 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.
- praptak 14y agoI 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.
- tptacek 14y agoThe 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.
- 385668 14y agoI 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.
- johncoltrane 14y agoI 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.
- why-el 14y agoI don't agree. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to support illegal activity (It's too trivial to site examples from US history).
- dpkendal 14y agoThe Underground Railroad. Prohibition. Hush-A-Phone. The Communications Decency Act. Crypto export regulations. Breaking DRM.
- katovatzschyn 14y agoOr so simple as speeding when you drive? There are many laws which do not function as they should.
- anonymous 14y agoCare to elaborate? I'm not a driver myself, so I haven't had to experience speed limits first hand. What's the problem with just driving under the posted speed limit?
- T-hawk 14y ago1. Speed limits are slow and people are impatient. 55 MPH on a highway feels quite pokey in clear conditions when 75 MPH is easily possible with no appreciable loss in safety. And 30 MPH on surface streets is positively crawling. They are designed low knowing that the average user will exceed them, similar to the MPAA's tax on blank recording media where the expectation of violating is built into the product. 2. Blending in with the crowd. If the speed limit is 55 but everybody is going 75, it is safer for you to drive at 75 in smooth traffic flow rather than go 55 and create waves of darting and merging traffic trying to go around you. 3. Speed limits are sometimes applied dishonestly in the name of safety, when the real goal is revenue generation from violators. Such a law is immoral and unjust - government abusing its monopoly cartel power - and breaking it represents civil disobedience. This is more what the ancestor posts are getting at.
- lumberjack 14y agoI disagree. Free software projects like the GNU foundation or the OpenBSD foundation are striving towards freedom. ThePirateBay.se et al are simply filling in on market demand created by the utter absurdity of treating digital data as if it was a can of tomatoes or a bag of crisps.
- klrr 14y agoThere is no "FOSS", Free Software is software which respects the users freedom, Open-Source software is software which allow the ability to study the source code(not that some Open-Source licenses is kinda like Free Software licenses too, but some are even similar to non-free software). They are two completely different things. Yes, I support FSF and GNU more than TPB of course.
- lumberjack 14y agoYou are absolutely right.
- smithzvk 14y agoThere is such a thing as FOSS. That stands for Free and Open Source Software. There is software that is "Free" and software that is Open Source and, as I'm sure you are aware, the software that belongs to both groups is the (vast?) majority of each respective group. It is called Free _and_ Open Source Software, it is the intersection of the two groups, and it is a pretty useful group to think about when you want to be inclusive and avoid word definition collisions with the word "free".
- klrr 14y agoNo, the Free Software movement and Open asource movement is completely seperated from eachother. Different names results in different ideas.
- smithzvk 14y agoGoing back and reading the initial comment, I think I see where you are coming from. The poster says "FOSS projects like GNU..." and that is off base if he was implying that GNU has anything to do with OSS. You are right, no one should be talking about a GNU as a FOSS project due to their outright rejection of the OSS ideology. But just so we're clear, it is possible to talk about FOSS itself (the software) in a meaningful way. It's not like the term is oxymoronic or something, in fact, the two descriptions are nearly redundant when it comes to describing the rights you get as a user, which is what you should be concerned with as a user of the software. Why shouldn't we apply this to projects as well? I guess the questions I would ask to clarify the point are: 1) What do you call a project that would like to empower users with software freedom but would also like to embrace the development style of Open Source? 2) Given that there are so many projects out there that embrace exactly that combination, shouldn't we have a name for that?
- paul9290 14y agoI support it for the sheer fact that it has forced copyright to offer digital alternatives in a quicker manner here in the states - i.e. Hulu. FOr those who dont have access to Hulu and other similar services that's not your fault and I say keep downloading torrents!
- propercoil 14y agowho says it's illegal? your "democratic" government? these "laws" are unconstitutional thus irrelevant like "laws" made by the Nazis in 1943. You would not give shelter to a jew now would you!? it's illegal! same stuff in a different coating and a different mask - you swallow it like a good boy
- carbocation 14y agoLawyers talk about malum in se (bad, in itself) and malum prohibitum (bad, because we have prohibited it). I think these are useful concepts, even if we choose not to use the terms. Mala in se I (tautologically, perhaps?) don't support. For mala prohibita, it really depends on context.
- jsilence 14y agoInterresting distinction. Raises the question why we are prohibiting things that are not malum in se.
- carbocation 14y agoIdeally, because contextually it makes sense. It might not be inherently evil to drive 180 miles per hour, but we might guess it to be statistically unsafe in residential neighborhoods, so we prohibit it.
- tptacek 14y agoBecause they are the rules we've adopted to make society, the markets, contested access to scarce resources, drug safety, or what- have- you work. Sometimes there's more than one set of workable rules, but we have to pick one.