Ethics in the Information Age Discussion Project on Copyright

For each of the following activities, decide:

1. Whether it is illegal under current copyright law

2. Whether it is ethically wrong to do it (given it’s legal status)

3. Whether it should be illegal (i.e., whether it would be better to revise the copyright laws so that this sort of thing had a different legal status).

A. Making a copy of a music CD one has legally purchased and giving it to a friend.

B. Making a copy of a music CD one has legally purchased and selling the original to a used CD store.

C. Ripping music from a CD one has legally purchased to one’s computer and transferring the files to your MP3 player.

D. Letting a friend put that MP3 file on his or her MP3 player.

E. Putting that MP3 file on one’s website so that it will be heard (streaming audio?) by anyone who click’s on a link.

F. Posting that MP3 file on your personal website in a form that allows visitors to download it.

G. Making that MP3 file available to strangers through a file-sharing system like Napster or Limewire.

H. Purchasing music from a legitimate online retailer (like ITunes) and either breaking the DRM protection or burning it to a CD and then ripping it to a sharable file form and then sharing it with

a. friends

b. strangers

I Breaking the DRM on a movie so that you can play it on a non-supported system

J Breaking the DRM on a music file so that you can play it on a new computer, because you have already transferred it to the maximum allowed number of computers.

I.  Using samples from other people’s copyrighted music to create a new piece of music and posting it on (say) YouTube
            a. Case 1: the entire work is nothing but samples artfully arranged
            b. Case 2: the samples are mixed with music written and performed by you