[Drakim]

While this isn't something I disagree with in principle, I can't help but to feel uneasy about it. Should companies have helped Nazi Germany to identify Jews since that was the local law?

If not, the clearly the principle isn't so solid after all. But I don't know what to replace it with.

[bduerst]

Even if Google didn't change search results, people who clicked on the censored website links still wouldn't be able to load the sites. You have to ask which is better - serving information in the framework provided or serving no information at all.

[Drakim]

Yeah you are probably right about that.

[jdmichal]

This reminded me of a conversation chain I had a couple years ago. The main point is that civil disobedience is the purposeful breaking of law, but it is just that. You can break the law, but you need to do so with preparation to face whatever the penalty is. I'm not sure what civil disobedience looks like at the corporate level... I can't think of an examples. At the end, I think it must be an individual decision with enough corporate authority to make it stick... In which case, it falls under the same ideals.

(I've removed contextual text that I think is irrelevant for this discussion.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11504953

... Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey laws, not the refusal to uphold them. People participating in civil disobedience do it with the understanding that they can (and should) be prosecuted for such. They do so to act as martyrs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506428

...

The bottom line is, you need to be really, really careful when you start arguing for "ethics" and "morality" as a basis for execution of law. For instance, to make a concrete example: It could be argued that based on the ethics and morality of the Nazis, that the mass murders committed under the Holocaust were in fact them morally disobeying those supra-national human rights laws. Who are you to say that the Nazi morality is wrong? You can't point to the agreed-upon supra-national human rights laws, because you are in fact arguing that law should be violated based on morality!

In fact, one of the ways to view law is as an encoding of the morality of the society it covers. Sometimes laws, being fixed entities, and society, being ever changing, drift apart over time. Same as software drifts from the requirements of business if not kept up to date. It usually takes an example like this German one to point out the absurdity, and if the law really is no longer part of the society's morality, becomes fairly easy for lawmakers to fix. (As a reminder, this law being invoked is very old -- from when Germany was a monarchy and insulting dictator kings was morally a very serious crime!)

[bun_at_work]

This is a bit late, but does civil disobedience for a corporation in the modern America have to be violation of the law? I'm wondering where Apple's refusal to help the FBI unlock the San Bernadino shooter's iPhone lies.

[jdmichal]

That's a great example! Obviously depends on your definition. Wikipedia seems inclusive of "demands, orders, or commands".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience