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Comparing intellectual property law to chattel slavery is a bit tasteless, no?

• jlgreco 14y ago
  I don't think he is suggesting, explicitly nor implicitly, an equivalency in severity.
  • igravious 14y ago
    He's not suggesting equivalency but he did make a comparison, one which is a bit tasteless, is it not?
    • jlgreco 14y ago
      No, I don't think so. If we want to learn from history it is important that we allow ourselves to make comparisons to the past, even if the magnitude of severity is completely off. If we assume that we are progressing as time passes, then with any luck the severity in comparisons to the past should always be off. That should not phase us, but rather be seen as a sign of progress. Now, if the situation is a teenager calling his mother "literally Hitler" because he was given a bedtime, then Godwin's law is probably pretty applicable, but that is an incredibly extreme case. The topic here is civil disobedience in the face of unjust laws. One law happens to be much worse than other, but I simply cannot find the comparison itself to be tasteless or offensive. That period in our history teaches us a painful collective lesson about the ethics of civil disobedience, I would find it more offensive to ignore that lesson. Assertions of equivalency would be troubling, but I see none here.
    • nitrogen 14y ago
      Ideally, as history and society progress, there will always be bigger evils in the past than the present. This is a sign of progress. In that light, comparing the evils of the present to the evils of the past is not so tasteless, because there aren't as many evils of the present on the same scale. Edit: I promise I wrote this without reading jlgreco's comment.