Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Most of these are problems with any large company, not Amazon per se.

Yes, companies want to kill competition by any means and do all sorts of bad-for-the-consumer and bad-for-workers things. We didn't just wake up yesterday into the industrial era. That's all of capitalism. Amazon isn't special, just high-profile.

> if you rent a server from Amazon, you have no rights.

Amazon isn't in the business of granting rights.

If you don't like any of the things included in Stallman's list, don't expect change to come from Amazon or some boycott thereof. The change should come from us by way of better governance.

I feel like Stallman missed a good time to make a positive point on why we need better governance and perhaps regulation to reign in the much uglier parts of corporations/capitalism/behavior that we might as a society not like. He could have been inspiring and spoken to a much wider audience than the paranoia crowd.

Instead he wanted to make a negative piece about Amazon. It made the top of HN, where we'll talk aboutit for 15 hours, and then nobody else will listen.

More generally I think its safe to say that people will not listen to a boycott that inconveniences them. They might listen to a positive message on the reasons we should support and enact laws upholding digital freedoms, worker rights, and things to stop anti-competitive practices.

There are a lot of digital freedom causes worth championing, but I'm always disappointed by Stallman. It's easy to hate. We need more positive people that can frame causes like this more effectively.

"If you rent a server from Amazon, you have no rights" is a silly statement. It is a privilege to do business with Amazon and either party has the ability to severe that. You do not have a right to use a server that Amazon provides.

Rights are not granted by anything. They describe the extent of government power. That is all.

> Most of these are problems with any large company, not Amazon per se.

Agreed! We won't get Amazon or any of these large corporations to change by boycotting their services (w/ no success). Instead we need to push for tech savy people to make it high up in Washington and European Union so that they protect customer interests instead of granting corporations all the power.

Let me rephrase that more accurately:

Instead we need to push for tech savvy people to make it high up in Washington and European Union so that they preempt consumers' choices about who to do business with, instead of letting free individuals make decisions for themselves.

    The change should come from us by way of better governance.

If this more an issue of the "lazy masses"? I don't believe for a second that a well organized boycott would not get Amazon's attention and action on a given issue. The problem is that a boycott is much harder to implement than getting someone to vote on issue X.

> don't expect change to come from Amazon or some boycott thereof. The change should come from us by way of better governance.

Devil's advocate: Rights are inherent, and an external authority (government, etc.) cannot by definition grant them; it can only restrict them (though whether it should is separate).

It's a subtle point, but I bring this up because it's more in line with the way Stallman thinks, so to miss that point (for any other readers) is to misunderstand Stallman.

I don't get your point, can external authorities not protect your rights? What is the course of action that you are getting at?

To be honest, I'm having a hard time way to express this concisely enough for an HN comment, but the gist is that, while the government can protect rights, rights must exist even if no single authority is responsible for protecting them. Otherwise, they are privileges.

This isn't quite the same thing, but look up the arguments for why Internet access is not a human right[1]. I can't find the article I'm thinking of that explains it well, but the idea is that, if someone lacks Internet access on a desert island, it's not necessarily because someone is actively infringing on their right. If someone is a slave to another, someone is actively infringing on their human rights under Article 4 of the UDHR.

[1] Contrast 'human right' with 'civil right' and you'll see why the concept of 'rights' is so complex.

Think of it this way:

The GPL grants you the right of access to source code for software distributed to you by denying the author his right to keep it from you.

So the GPL, like the state, doesn't grant rights per se, so much as it restricts others' ability to take action that would infringe on said rights.

That's an ivory tower political philosophy concept, merely a new mask put on the religious concept that certain inalienable rights are given to us by God.

Of the rights we have in the United States, most we have because of long western European (and particularly British) tradition (which incorporates religious doctrine, particularly Christianity), and some we have because we fought a war of independence against England to win those extra rights.

The constitutions of the U.S. and its component States try to minimize infringements into individual liberty, by defaulting to individual liberty, but society has become so complex that that fail-liberal ideal has been lost in practice. Individual liberty ends up affecting other people too much to be ignored. Few people want to take the heat for defending the negative aspects of individual liberty, so the erosion continues.

"Positive rights" vs "negative rights", "rights" vs "privileges": I don't think any of that philosophical wrangling does anything to change the reality of the situation.

Individual freedom is not inherent inside a political body. If we want rights, we have to defend them, and if we want rights we don't have, we have to fight (politically speaking) to obtain them.

Rights are something we made up. In fact, I dare you to find a difference between a right to [free speech|health care] and an entitlement to [free speech|health care].

Don't get me wrong, I'm staunchly in favor of human rights. But claiming they're inherent won't do you any good when you're looking at the barrel of a gun, regardless of who holds it. Rights are created and defended in the culture first, and may or may not percolate through to government and law.

> Rights are created and defended in the culture first, and may or may not percolate through to government and law.

In case you missed it, that was the point of my original comment. An 'inherent' right can (and should) be defended by the culture, regardless of whether or not any government exists to respect it.

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