The professor writes, on Digg and civil disobedience:

...there are some laws that individuals will appropriately conclude that they should disobey, laws that while enacted pursuant to the extant applicable procedures, are nonetheless beyond the scope of what should be law in a well-constituted society. In those circumstances, civil disobedience will be appropriate and we should be grateful to those who are willing to suffer the consequences of disobeying illegitimate law.

I wouldn’t think that not being able to play an encrypted high-definition DVD on your platform of choice would fall into that category. I understand fully that people disagree about whether digital rights management and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are good copyright policy. I also understand that users can be frustrated by limitations imposed by DRM (I’ve run into those myself). But I think the DMCA (and the DRM that it makes possible) is a long, long way from the sorts of laws for which civil disobedience is an appropriate response. Simply not liking the law is not enough. There must be more, something that recognizes the nature of reasonable disagreement over law, and the range of possible legitimate variations about those laws.

Yesterday, Digg probably made a business decision: it can litigate tomorrow but it was going to lose customers today. I doubt that it made a decision about the need for civil disobedience, and as I have suggested already, I am skeptical that it could justify its decision in those terms...

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 2:27 PM | DMCA, DRM & Watermarks, etc., Liberty and IP

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