Ethical disobedience

The heated rhetoric surrounding digital copyright in general, and peer-to-peer file sharing in particular, has inspired great confusion about what the copyright law does and does not prohibit. Most of the key legal questions are still unsettled, in part because copyright defendants have run out of money and gone out of business before their cases could go to trial. In that vacuum, some copyright owners are claiming that their preferred rules of conduct are well-established legal requirements. But those claims are strategic; those rules have never been endorsed by the courts. They are made-up rules. There's a difference between our obligation to follow real rules, and our obligation to follow made-up ones. There may be an ethical obligation to follow real rules, even when they seem unreasonable. But we don't have any ethical obligation to follow made-up ones. Indeed, in this context, we may have an ethical obligation to resist them. Some copyright owners believe the law ought to enable them to control essentially all significant uses of their works. The law has never said that, but it gets closer and closer every day. If we behave as though the made-up rules were actually the law, we will make that day come much sooner.