Electronic civil disobedience, also known as ECD or cyber civil disobedience, can refer to any type of civil disobedience in which the participants use information technology to carry out their actions. Generally speaking, electronic civil disobedience involves the Internet.

One type of ECD is a coordinated DDoS against a specific target (a virtual sit-in). Continuing the practices of non violent, yet disruptive protest originally pioneered by Henry David Thoreau, this style of civil disobedience attempts to use computers and the Internet not only for political and social activism but for actual substantially disruptive protest as well. A branch of hacktivism, electronic civil disobedience is unique in that in many cases, it involves large numbers of people and generally makes use of only legal methods of protest. For instance, a single person reloading a website repeatedly is not illegal, but if enough people do it at the same time it can render the website inaccessible.

Another type of electronic civil disobedience is the use of the Internet for publicized and deliberate violations of a law that the protesters take issue with, such as copyright law. One well known instance of large scale intentional copyright infringement was on February 24, 2004, in an event called Grey Tuesday. Protesters intentionally violated EMI's copyright of The White Album by distributing MP3 files of a mashup album called The Grey Album, in an attempt to draw public attention to copyright reform issues and anti-copyright ideals.

Blatant disregard of copyright law by millions of Internet users every day on file sharing networks might also be considered a form of constant ECD, as the people doing it have decided to simply ignore a law that they disagree with.

See also

• E-democracy