I'd still be more likely to say the officer is making their situation worse. Take away the false dichotomy of loud and obnoxious vs calm and compliant and consider someone who doesn't answer irrelevant questions and is waiting for the officer to do their job (calm and not compliant). That person might have their situation worsened by the officer who thinks the person they're talking to is obligated to answer to the officer's whims.
(Based on what I've seen of police body camera footage.)
Anyway, I'm not really familiar with Kim Dotcom's case. It sounds like he's been more on the "loud and obnoxious" side and the authorities involved are not city response officers; it's hard to draw a parallel. Just pointing out that "you're just making it worse for yourself" is something a schoolyard bully would say to the kid who's too small to defend themself but refuses to comply.
> Something a schoolyard bully would say to the kid who's too small to defend themself but refuses to comply.
Yeah, probably right. But, also, yeah, easier sometimes to just appease the bully and move on with life.
I am scared of the police. In the rare times I have to interact with them I am overwhelmingly polite and cautious because I know that they have the ability to fuck up my day, and maybe my life.
But that's a HORRIBLE status quo. That is a bug in our society that needs to be eradicated.
Plus, I've got basically every privilege that exists under the sun, so luckily I have to encounter this problem only very rarely. I can't imagine what it must be like if you have the misfortune of being born in the wrong place or looking the wrong way, such that you have automatically tense/hostile encounters with the police continuously. At some point it must be exhausting to try to maintain this composure the entire time.
Growing up or re-evaluating ideas you got when you were 14 is also not against the rules.
What are you doing to justify feeling like this? Is it just out of abundance of caution? When I interact with police it's usually for boring reasons - like I broke some petty law and they justifiably question me about it (and more often than not just let it slide, but they don't have to -after all they're just doing their job).
The tricky thing about a principled stand in favour of civil liberties is that you spend a lot of your time defending scoundrels, because it's their civil liberties that are most in danger from the mob and government. And once their rights go, yours are sure to follow.
[0] If you disagree, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levi...
More likely because those people remain naïve about the real world. In a past career I had some interaction with IP enforcement lawyers. They were stuck in the past then and have not really evolved. Their understanding of "the internet" extends only to those things discoverable via google search. Megaupload was knocked down because it was so visible. Piracy is more alive now than ever, but as it is no longer visible via Google, the likes of the MPAA and IRAA cannot see it.
How so? Google is a major distributor of most pirated material through YouTube and their search engine still makes finding stuff easy. I'd argue that p2p is nearly irrelevant nowadays and server-oriented distribution is the main model.
At that point, I had gotten really good at spotting counterfeits, so I really doubt we were selling any counterfeits, especially when they couldn't come up with a single instance. The publishing companies continue to do this because used books cut into their profits.
I just sent my lawyer after them and they never came back.
Amazon and the publishers eventually came to an agreement that there were certain textbooks they just won't allow to be sold as used on their platform.
My wife asked me last week to help her get a textbook in a format that could be viewed on a reMarkable tablet, which can read PDFs but won't work with arbitrary DRM schemes. I checked my options and found the publisher selling some DRM crap, and some clearly illegal sites selling DRM-free PDFs. Since I found plenty of people vouching that they'd received what they bought, I chose to (using a Privacy card number) willingly buy from the criminals, since they were the only ones willing to provide me what I needed: an unencrypted PDF that we can actually use on the device we want.
I know publishers are afraid someone will email the PDF to the whole class, so that's why college textbooks probably ought to be folded into tuition, that way (1) publishers can get paid for the correct number of copies and (2) someone who actually has to pay the money (the school) is somewhat in the loop on textbook selection. It's broken now since those actually paying (students) have no say in book selection.
I understand this as "if you're willing to suffer the consequences, then there is no rule."
E.g. a millionaire might be fine getting a speeding ticket, so that particular rule might as well not exist (except in Finland? where they scale speeding tickets to income)
> [1] On August 4, 2017, the trial jury found Shkreli guilty on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and not guilty on five other counts which included wire fraud.
Granted, the case started in 2015 probably in response to him hiking the prices in 2014 but the thing he was being an edge lord about isn't what directly did him in. However, Capone didn't go to prison for murder either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli#Criminal_convic...
The opposite also happens and you can see cases like this or Shkreli, Dotcom and others where they think being edgy on top of minor crimes will not get them in hot water because other people do worse but keep on the low down, but time and again you see these guys being made an example of, probably because a bunch of people dealing with their cases also start disliking them personally.
So I guess like, don't behave like an asshole generally, but specially if you're also committing crimes. Kinda like not breaking traffic laws if you have a dead body in the trunk.