Buckwheat wrote:
Moggalana wrote:But only because something is illegal (in some countries) doesn't mean it is illegitimate,
If you are within the jurisdiction of the law, then yes, it does.
Legal and
legitimate are often used as synonyms but there is some difference.
Legal means that something is right according to the law (
lawful),
legitimate can mean the same but it can also mean - especially when used in contrast to
legal - that something is right according to
moral or
ethical norms. An example: Death penalty is
legal (
lawful) in some countries but it is not
legitimate (
ethical). From now on, I will use
ethical instead of
legitimate to prevent further misconceptions.
I forgot to mention in my previous post that the Swiss government decided not to implement a stricter version of the copyright law. File-sharing will stay legal as long as it is not done for commercial purposes (
piracy). The main reason was the fact that the percental amount of money people spend on 'entertainment' hadn't changed and wouldn't change if the law was different. It is also not practical for a government to incriminate a third or more of its citizens, especially not in Switzerland where they have a very direct form of democracy.
This leads to another important point: the relativity of norms. Georg Jellinek coined the term
Die normative Kraft des Faktischen (
the normative power of the de facto). It basically means that (1) a norm doesn't apply anymore when nobody is following it and (2) a norm can be changed or a new norm can be created when a majority acts accordingly. File-sharing is - de facto - a common practice, especially among younger (<30) people, and it will only increase in the future when a majority of the people will be
digital natives. Thus, I predict that file-sharing will be
legal in most countries and not considered
unethical in 10-20 years.