News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive. Parent comment

Re:My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Intern... by Silhouette on Thursday July 23, 2020 @11:28PM (#23935417)
You make a reasonable point, so let's accept it for the sake of this discussion. Shouldn't the response then be to update copyright law, taking into account modern trends in technology and society? Surely the answer can't be to let one private organisation decide it's above the law and infringe with impunity.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Intern... by nitrogen on Friday July 24, 2020 @01:09AM (#23935952)
Sometimes the path to legalization of something requires ongoing and widespread illegality before the question will even be considered.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Intern... by Silhouette on Friday July 24, 2020 @01:20AM (#23935986)
That's not a strong argument, IMHO, since it would similarly condone any other law-breaking activity where the perpetrator disagrees with the law. It's not as if copyright wasn't controversial before or the IA's actions here have any realistic prospect of moving the needle.

If you're talking about civil disobedience, that's a different matter, but one of the key things about effective civil disobedience is that large numbers of people have to break the law and accept the penalty in order to overwhelm the system and thus show that the law does not have popular support.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Intern... by account42 on Friday July 24, 2020 @07:26AM (#23938161)
You don't get to large numbers of people disregarding the law before first having a few.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Intern... by Silhouette on Friday July 24, 2020 @07:39AM (#23938281)
I suspect you're glossing over the accept the penalty part of my previous comment, which is quite important.

Besides that, how many other Internet Archives do you think will follow the one we've been discussing by also flagrantly violating both the letter and the spirit of copyright law?

[ Parent | on HN ]