Ethics and Morality of Intellectual Property Rights Essay

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Digital Rights



a) Sonderholm (2010) describes intellectual property rights as "a socio-economic tool that creates a temporary monopoly", specifically as a means to allow creators to earn profit, which in theory will incentivize more creation.

On the issue of digital rights management versus the public's right to fair use, there are several issues to unpack. First is that a person who creates intellectual property has no obligation to do anything with it. In fact, there are vast reservoirs of unpublished novels, unfilmed screenplays, photographs, drawings…a vast amount of the intellectual property that is created is never brought to the public at all, and still more would be if there were means to do so provided to the creator.



But should a creator decide to bring their work to the public sphere, they and only they should have the right to determine how that work is delivered to the public. It is unethical for a lawmaker, for example, to dictate that a content creator should release that content via any one mechanism – the right should rest solely with the content creator. There have long been legal systems that protect intellectual property, and for the most part those systems function within the context of a legal environment that places the onus on the content creator to defend his/her own work. For example, if somebody plagiarizes this paper, it would be my job as author to defend utilize the court system to defend my property rights. If I choose not to, then that is my choice, and the state should never intervene in my right to choose if and when I want to defend my intellectual property rights.



There are several arguments to be made against the use of digital rights management technology. First, most obviously, is that a third party that/who did not participate in the creation of the work shouldn't have property rights to it – if you didn't create it, it's not yours. Why this is even a question before law is the result of amazing intellectual gymnastics.



Beyond that, however, there is the simple matter that intellectual property is different from other property in several key ways. It is non-rivalrous, meaning that it is not diminished by its consumption (Moore & Himma, 2014). This is a key distinction from physical property, because it means that most intellectual property can theoretically be consumed by all human beings simultaneously.

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While Moore offers sophomoric slippery slope arguments against the non-rivalrous argument, Himma reasonably points out that the non-rivalrous nature of something like digital property does not imply rights to consumption. That said, the fact that there are no barriers to consumption, and that consumption of the good does no objective harm to anybody, means that charging a cost for access to intellectual property is immoral, if a superior outcome would be achieved by not charging. As Masnick (2010) rightly points out, a moral dilemma is where there is a choice in the allocation of harm; freeing up intellectual property often results in no added harm, only added benefit, negating the moral dilemma altogether.



This leads to another important dimension of this argument, the utilitarian. In many instances, intellectual property would produce greater results for the greatest number. This is likely true for entertainment forms (more people being entertained is a good thing) as well as for more patently obvious examples like academic journal articles. The latter is an extreme example, but hammers home the point – when you hide knowledge behind a paywall, denying most of humanity access to that knowledge, and you aren't even the researcher who produced the work, you are committing an egregious crime against humanity. Taylor (2013) takes an equally strong, if less hyperbolic, stance, but the point is the same. Scholarship benefits from more scholars having access to more information, and that is to say nothing of the damage done to non-scholars by shutting them off from entire fields of discourse. We decry ignorance while defending the right of people to erect barriers to the elimination of ignorance.



Telling people "you're not allowed to learn that because you're not rich enough" is the same classist, racist, sexist nonsense that humanity has suffered from for its history, and they good people are trying to work to eliminate. Hiding knowledge that would benefit many, in the name of profit, is morally indefensible. It is not as though the lack of financial incentive would eliminate intellectual curiosity, or the creation of creative works.



There is a final dynamic to the issue, however. Intellectual property covers both ideas, and the products that arise from those ideas. This adds a new wrinkle- for example it is said there are no new ideas….....

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References

Masnick, M. (2010) Is intellectual property itself unethical? TechDirt. Retrieved April 21, 2018 from https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100519/0404029486.shtml

Moore, A. & Himma, K. (2014) Intellectual property. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved April 21, 2018 from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intellectual-property/#GenCriIntPro

Sonderholm, J. (2010) Ethical issues surrounding intellectual property rights. Philosophy Compass. Vol. 5 (12) 1107-1115.

Taylor, M. (2013) Hiding your research behind a paywall is immoral. The Guardian. Retrieved April 21, 2018 from https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/jan/17/open-access-publishing-science-paywall-immoral
 

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