* Illustration: Jason Lee * It's 2 am on a Saturday and you have a sudden hankering to see an '80s Patrick Swayze kick some ass in Road House. But you don't have the DVD, the video stores are closed, and for some reason the movie isn't available on Hulu, iTunes, or anywhere else online. Is it OK to download it illegally? Yes. But there's a catch: There is only one way to morally and ethically justify breaking the law, and that's as an act of protest. So downloading something that isn't available online has to be an act of civil disobedience: You're letting the studio pinheads know it's time to stop limiting the potential of the Internet by restricting their wares to outmoded hard-copy formats.
"Most philosophers operating within the liberal tradition maintain that, as a suitably constrained, conscientious, and communicative breach of law, civil disobedience is often a morally justifiable practice," says Kimberley Brownlee, a philosophy professor at the University of Manchester. "It can highlight injustices in society and can rectify democratic deficits by regenerating debate on topics that have been neglected or silenced."
But don't take that as license to BitTorrent with abandon. "Illegal downloading might be regarded as an act of private conscientious objection against laws believed to be indefensible," Brownlee says. "However, when people take such acts principally for reasons of self-gratification, they cannot claim to be conscientiously motivated."
Translation: You can't download the movie just to save some scratch. It has to be about getting studios to make their content available online. As such, you should donate the cost of the content to your favorite charity (to prove it's not about money) and then blog and tweet about your actions.
Civil disobedience, as the professor says, is a communicative activity. If no one knows what you've done, you've done little to effect change. Dalton would not approve.
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