Also:

  human dissection (grave robbing)
  translating the Bible into English
  silk production outside of China (death penalty for exporting worm eggs)
  rubber production in Asia (seeds smuggled out of Brazil)
  the Underground Railroad
  heliocentrism
  AIDS treatment (see Dallas Buyers Club)
  Needle exchange programs for IV drug users
  Ridesharing/airbnb/napster (obvious ones)
  SF gay marriage licenses (in defiance of CA law)

Translating the Bible into English was not illegal. I very much doubt Bede or the monks of Lindisfarne were breaking the law!

The same for heliocentrism. No one took Copernicus to court.

With silk and rubber the smuggling was illegal, the actual cultivation was not

Grave robbing was illegal (and still is) but dissection was not.

Needle exchange was illegal in some US states but was legal in many other countries.

Reference to support the claim that translating the bible into English was banned (William Tyndale was executed for doing it): https://nobimu.no/en/subject-articles/banned-translations-of...

You can nitpick that "the church executing people for it" is not exactly the same as "illegal" but that's missing the point.

Unauthorized Bible translations were prohibited in England at the time, but Tyndale was executed in the Netherlands, where there was no such ban: https://books.google.de/books?id=mfZlsUVYClwC&pg=P315&source...

The context of this is the list of examples was of things done illegally for the first time - it lists these things as "also" in response to a claim that water was *first* chlorinated illegally.

While there were bans or a requirement for authorisation of translations of the Bible in certain times and places (mostly the 1300s to 1500s) the first translations of (parts of the) Bible into English had been done centuries before this, some as early at the 7th century. This makes them some of the oldest written works we know of in English at all. They were also done by the church.

> You can nitpick that "the church executing people for it" is not exactly the same as "illegal" but that's missing the point.

When did this happen? Tyndale was tried and executed by the secular authorities in a place where there were no laws against translating the Bible.

The earliest translations into English were done by the Church.

Galileo. You are right about Copernicus.

>Needle exchange was illegal in some US states but was legal in many other countries

I'm not sure what your point is here

> The process of chlorinating water was first done illegally.

I tried to find a source on this but it doesn't seem to be true? The first chapter of this book describes the history of chlorination: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Chlorina... (which is a source Wikipedia cites) and it doesn't appear to mention anything about illegally chlorinating water. After looking in that book I asked ChatGPT to find a source for the claim, and it reported the claim was false. Chlorination was initially controversial but I can't find anything claiming it was illegal?