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Comment by sage_joch | Hacker News Reader

I have no problem "pirating" works that should be in the public domain by now, such as The Great Gatsby. It is clear that Congress has stopped representing the American people, and I refuse to respect laws that were designed to benefit a well-connected few at the expense of the public.

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I'm right there with you in thinking copyright lasts far too long but for the sake of argument what if someone said "I don't pay taxes because (x) is wrong with our tax system" or "I'm alright with forcing myself on a woman because what qualifies as rape is far too broad a definition" or even "I drive as fast as I want in school zones because I can see when a damn kid is crossing the road"? Sure, the law doesn't make sense but how does breaking it help the situation? Can't we find better ways to get the attention of those in power to make a change? I feel like these kinds of protests don't help. They just call people like you "bad apples" and write you off. There has to be a better way. I'm not faulting you for your position, just wondering if maybe there's something else we can do.

sage_joch mentioned pirating works that would otherwise be in the public domain (eg, The Great Gatsby), so I would say it's more equivalent to refusing to pay some particular tax that one disagrees with while still paying others.

> There has to be a better way.

Well, there doesn't have to be. The system might just be irretrievably broken.

A difference is that the anti-copyright position is quite generally agreed (and also seems rationally well-supported). Disavowal is not merely a wild personal impulse.

And a/the virtue of any law is that element of general agreement, not just that it happens to be the law. So to do something agreed on but not law seems righter than to do something that is law but not so much agreed on.

Perhaps it could be put simply as: ultimately the law should follow us, not the other way around.

Right, and that makes perfect sense. But haven't you seen representatives point to people like this and write them off as "bad apples"? When a large enough portion of the population deliberately ignores a law in protest it can't just be the end of it. That's only part one. Disobedience as a protest isn't enough. There has to be a second part where we somehow communicate to those in power why we act this way and why things need to change. Without that second part we're all just a bunch of hippie, counter culture, bad apples as far as they're concerned.

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