Ethics in the Information Age         Discussion Project on Copyright

Discuss and try to agree on answers to the following questions:

1. What are the three errors that people make about copyrights, according to Richard Stallman? Try to state each of them as a clear concise sentence or two.

Notice that Stallman's article is based on the idea that the US Constitution gives Congress the power to protect what we now think of as 'intellectual property' only for the benefit of the public, and not because the artists, writers, and other producers of these goods deserve to be compensated for their labor. In his view (as in Quinn's) there is no 'natural right' to intellectual property.

2. What do you think that the creators of intellectual property deserve and why do they deserve it? 

Note:  The ‘why?’ is as important as the ‘what?’.

Some things to consider:

Does the work that they do to produce their works give them a moral right to control what is done with that work? Does it give them a moral right to profit from that work? Is there any reason to treat these moral rights as temporary?  Should the fact that much of this creative work is done as “work for hire,” where the employer ends up owning the rights and not the actual creator, change our assessment at all?  What about the fact that copyrights persist long after the death of the creator of the work?  (Does my right to profit from my intellectual/artistic labor, if I have one, include a right to pass on that ability to my heirs?)  How should we deal with Stallman’s observation that the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution seems to say that the purpose of copyright laws is to benefit the public and not to protect the natural rights of creators?

3. How can the law best be revised or reformed in order to give creators what they deserve (but no more than what they deserve), but also to protect any relevant rights belonging to other people (consumers or other creators who wish to use the work in creating their own)?