[ SECRET POST #4950 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4950 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 56 secrets from Secret Submission Post #709.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Corporations owning IP forever is a problem. But your average Joe Shmoe should own his own work for the duration of his life, at the very least.

Both things can be true at the same time.

[(Anonymous)]

Intellectual property isn't bad as a concept, intellectual property laws are bad as they exist

[philstar22]

I'll agree that there are lots of bad parts, though I don't think they are completely unsaleable the way some other areas of the law that are just completely awful. But regardless, I don't think saying they are bad as they exist means it is okay to just ignore them and make a profit off someone else's work. I would not consider this a good example of breaking a bad law for a good reason except in specific examples where the person was specifically, say, resisting corporations who had bought up intellectual property from the person who actually created it and keeping that person from the profits.

You can't just willing nilly break laws you don't like. There is a place for protesting by pointed, specific, targeted lawbreaking. But that is a specific thing with a specific purpose and is not the same thing as just ignoring laws you don't like.

[(Anonymous)]

+1000000 Well said.

[type_wild]

Yeup. Making a comic about Scrooge McDuck suing Donald for writing Herlock Sholmes fanfic is a very different creative endeavour than making patreon-exclusive Johnlock smut.

ETA: please ignore the hypocricy of the first example that fell into my head there

[(Anonymous)]

I don't believe there's any inherent value or duty to obey a silly, senseless law. I don't see why any rational person should accord respect to an irrational, foolish law.

I'm not arguing that laws must be perfect to be compelling. I don't think that there can be, and I'm not going to try to find, a bright line distinction between what laws are and are not worth of respect. I know no system of laws will ever be perfect and you have to accept some things are arbitrary or disagreeable or just done in an arbitrary or inefficient way. I think it's a question of degrees. But I think the status of copyright laws is thoroughly bad, I don't think anyone trying to design an adequate system would come up with this system unless they were a damn fool, and so I don't think the law is worthy of respect (of course, there are still empirical reasons why it might be prudent to obey the law regardless of my respect for it, but that's a different question).

And it's not clear to me that current copyright law is less bad of a law than EG prohibition (or marijuana legalization). And I sure as hell don't think anyone had any kind of duty not to ignore prohibition law. I certainly wouldn't have felt any compunction about ignoring it.

[philstar22]

I think that frankly that's a really messed up mindset. I think being a citizen of a country means following its laws barring some specific exceptions such as the type of protest I mentioned above. I don't think individuals get to decide for themselves what laws are good and what laws they follow. I may not like a lot of our laws, but I also think that breaking them just because you don't like them is wrong. I feel that way about marijuana too. I personally think our laws regarding marijuana are bad and am in favor of legalization. I also think that choosing to use right now while it is illegal is wrong.

[(Anonymous)]

The problem with your reasoning is that there's a whole lot of people in our countries, who believe that these silly, senseless, follish laws not worth their respect are the same laws, which forbid them from raping children and beating their wives. Mercifully, citizens don't get to pick and choose which laws they want to follow.

[(Anonymous)]

Citizens do get to pick and choose which laws they want to follow. Sometimes there are consequences if you choose not to follow the law, but every citizen absolutely does have the choice to obey or disobey any law or set of laws. I don't think that most people refrain from breaking laws out of a moral commitment to the duty of obeying the law. Rather, I think that most people refrain from breaking the law either from a moral concern with the act itself, or from prudence (or both).

From a moral point of view, I think people refrain from murder, rape, spousal abuse, etc because they think those things are morally wrong - morally wrong in themselves regardless of what the law says. The idea of someone who doesn't consider spousal abuse morally wrong, but who does consider it a moral duty to follow the law and so refrains from spousal abuse on those grounds, is somewhat absurd to me and I have to think that the number of such people is very small. And from a pragmatic point of view, following laws is often the most prudent course of action, because the state will punish you for breaking them if they find out that you did so (in theory).

But neither of those things require us to respect the laws as a moral entity.

[(Anonymous)]

That's not true though. People do follow laws out of moral commitment to the duty of obeying the law. There have been times in history, when it was legal to do anything you wanted to black people, or to Jews, and people absolutely did take advantage of that freedom en masse. People's moral code depends very much on what they see other people get away with doing and saying. It takes only a couple psychopaths taking advantage of the lack of protection the law gives a certain group, for everyone else to look at it and think to themselves "I guess that's just how we do things around here!".