Along these lines, a thought has occurred to me during the whole SOPA/PIPA debate: what if everyone that opposed the bill and has ever shared and/or linked to any copyrighted material went on and confessed the crime, refused to pay any fines and asked to go to jail?
"confess the crime"? you mean like go to the police station and confess? They would probably take a statement and not try to bring you to trial. In this particular case, it's people who are already been charged who are considering trying to go to trial.
What does that have to do with anything? You don't get a jury trial if you confess. I mean, you do, but anybody who trods the path you suggest will likely just take whatever sentence is offered. The story hinges on people being accused, indicted.
I understand that. But my point is more along the lines of "crashing the system" by simply having millions of people going to jail just by having their sentence executed, as the law demands.
It's the impracticality of so many jury trials (i.e. before a sentence is handed down, or even a conviction) that is the proximate cause, the topic of conversation.
Again, I understand that. My thought is about crashing the system by abusing another kind of "impracticality": having so many people going to jail at once would grind it to a halt.
It doesn't have to be just SOPA or copyright stuff. Take the war on drugs. Abortion. Illegal immigration.
Get all women who had an illegal abortion and doctors who performed one, and get them organized to ask to go to jail. Get anyone who used any illegal drug, and organize them to go to jail. Get all illegal immigrants and organize them to demand deportation back to their countries.
In any of these examples, I'd guess that people would simply DoS the system. The laws would have to be revised, and they would get actual change to the system just by following it through.
How would that be suicide? I'm not thinking of just getting a few hundred people and telling them to go to some Oz-like prison. And I'm not talking about some organized movement like OWS where people protested over issues related to actions perpetrated by other people.
I'm thinking of a situation where a large number of people would be cooperatively going to submit themselves to the penal system related to things they did and believe that is not right to be punished for. Most likely, they would get results even before the actual collective "turning in". Can you imagine what would happen in the US if the good majority of the 7 million undocumented immigrants [1] organized a movement that announced they would turn themselves in?
Well, for starters, sharing copyrighted material at the level you are suggesting carries a minor fine. Generally, all the court would do is levy penalties on your failure to pay said fine and then issue a court order docking your wages.
Also, as these are relatively minor offenses, not much court time is actually required to handle these cases. It would be very efficient for the federal government (which has jurisdiction) to handle thousands of these cases in a timely fashion. Consequently, you would need hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people willing to put a crime on their record for this to work.
For the current laws, I assume you are correct. I was thinking more in terms of what would happen if SOPA actually passed with the three-strikes law and everything.
Anyway, I know that this is the kind of thing that is only an hypothetical. It certainly would take millions of people to actually do some sort of sacrifice. But one could think about it as a true test to reddit: if they managed to do anything like that, no one would accuse them of slacktivism ever again.
