Re: More Ethical Shit Hits the Fan

[Doug Alan <nessus@athena.mit.edu>]

> From: Richard Caley <rjc%edai.edinburgh.ac.uk@NSFNET-RELAY.AC.UK>

> The US is a society built on the assumption of the right of private
> property. Now one could scrap that assumption, but as long as it
> remains[,] ignoring intelectual property is as bad as ignoring
> physical property.

This is a lame argument.  Physical property and "intellectual property"
are two different things.  Why is ignoring "intellectual property" as
bad as ignoring physical property?  Certainly you could have a society
that recognized physical property, but did not recognize "intellectual
property".  The GNU people would propably have things this way if they
could.

There is a fundamental difference between "intellectual property" and
physical property.  If you steal someone's physical property, they no
longer have it.  However, if you steal someone's "intellectual
property", they *do* still have it.  This makes the two types of
"property" very different.  This does not mean, however, that the
victim might not have been hurt in some way.  The victim may lose some
or all ability to profit off of the "intellectual property", which
would indeed be a loss of physical property.  However, in many cases,
this may not be an issue.  In some cases, the damage to the victim may
be less tangible.  The victim may be embarrased by this "intellectual
property", and may not want it to be spread.  In other cases, there
may be absolutely no loss to the victim at all.

Because of the peculiar nature of "intellectual property" the ethical
issues involved with it are particularly interesting.  Conceptual
goods (or at least instances of any specific conceptual good), unlike
physical goods, are not constrained (except by law) to be a limited
resource, since "intellectual property" can be duplicated almost for
free.  The argument can be made that all "intellectual property"
should be in the public domain.  This way everone gets to have it --
everyone's life is improved, rather than just the lives of a few.
With conceptual goods, you can have your cake and eat it too!
However, the counter-argument can be made that if there is no
incentive structure to encourage people to create conceptual goods,
then there will be few conceptual goods to enrich the lives of all
these people.

Copyright and patent laws were invented to address both of these
issues.  The aim was to both provide an incentive structure for
creating conceptual goods and provisions to encourage conceptual goods
to be widely available for a reasonable price.  If you wanted to
copyright a book, for example, you also have to allow copies of the
book to be put in libraries, where anyone can read it for free.  You
only get the royalties for one book sold, but a thousand people might
read it.  If you copyright a book, you can't say that only one person
is allowed to read it.  The owner of the book can lend it to whoever
he wants to.  If you copyright a piece of music, you must allow it to
be played on non-profit radio, where you get no royalties and where
any listener can legally copy the work off of the airwaves and listen
to as much as they want to, without you receiving a cent.  If you want
more restrictive control over your ideas, you might be able to patent
them, but in this case you lose complete control over them (they
become public domain) after only seventeen years.  Notice that these
laws oppose the idea of absolute "intellectual property" that one has
total control over until the end of time.

Today, some people argue that these laws are not the best possible
laws to promote the common good.  Some people argue that they are too
restrictive, and that people should have more right to copy conceptual
goods -- that everyone should be allowed a piece of any intellectual
pie, no matter how poor they may be, because an intellectual pie can
be cut into an infinite number of full-size pieces.  Other people
claim that the laws are not restrictive enough and that people should
have more control and derive more personal profit from the product of
their minds.  I don't hope to settle this issue here.  What I am
trying to point out is that the issue is not so black and white as
some people involved in this discussion would have us believe.

To apply the above bits of philosophising to the issue at hand -- the
matter of distributing the Cathy Demo tapes -- there are two questions
that are relevant: "Is this legal?" and "Is this moral?"  Well, if the
original demo tape was copyrighted, and it seems likely that it would
have been (some of the songs on the tape definitely are copyrighted,
because they appear on albums) then it is clearly illegal.  What about
the question is it moral?  There are many approaches one might use to
answer this question.  I will outline two of them here.

One approach might be to say that one should always follow the law.
Following the law is always moral and breaking the law is always
immoral.  A less rigid version of the previous argument might say that
one should always follow a "good" law and that the copyright law is a
"good" law.  An even less rigid version of this argument might say
that one should always follow a set of good laws, not necessarily the
laws of the government, but a set of laws that would be a good thing
if everyone followed.  Someone pursuing this line of reasoning might
then argue, in some fashion, that any good set of laws would reject
such theft of "intellectual property".  This last version is not so
absurd.  Kant, I believe, supported this sort of ethics.

Another approach might be to analyze the situation using Utilitarian
ethics.  Which choice of actions in this situation would result in the
greatest common good (i.e. happiness and fulfillment)?  In order to
anaylize this, we must try to evaluate what Kate will lose from this
venture and what the people who receive the tape will gain.

Some people have argued that the tape project is stealing money from
Kate.  This is patently ludicrous.  This is not an issue.  Kate is not
planning on selling this material and if by some complete fluke she
did, anyone who would buy one of these tapes would undoubtedly also
buy the official release.  I will pummel anyone who brings up this
argument again.

What will Kate really lose out of this?  The truth of the matter is
that it might cause her some discomfort.  She may very well not like
to think that people are listening to her immature work by which she
is embarrased.  She has stated repeatedly in the past that she doesn't
want people to hear her work until it is perfect.  This would be
something to consider even if there were no copyright on the material
and it were totally in the public domain and completely legal to copy.
However, I truly doubt Kate will lose a whole lot of sleep over the
matter, even if it does make her a bit mad.  Another issue is that the
cat is already out of the bag.  Will it cause Kate any more discomfort
if 3,000 people hear this material, rather than only 1,000?  Maybe,
maybe not.

What will those who get a copy of this tape gain?  A large percentage
are likely to gain hours, days, weeks, or even years of intense enjoyment
and enligthenment from this tape.  So, which weighs heavier on the scale
when considering the common good?  A modicum of displeasure for Kate
or intense pleasure and enlightenment for hundreds of people?  One
might reasonably argue that the intense pleasure and enlightenment
times several hundred weighs more and that distributing the tape
causes the greatest common good.

Since, as I have shown, the issue is not cut and dry, it is not black
and white -- reasonable arguments can be made for both the morality
and immorality of distributing the tapes -- it is time to shut up
about the morality of issue.  This is not "talk.philosophy.misc".  Let
IED and the other subscribers to Love-Hounds and rec.music.gaffa
decide for themseleves without being preached to and verbally
bludgeoned.

Your humble pseudo-philosopher,
|>oug

"I've been told, when I get older
 That I'll understand it all,
 But I'm not sure if I want to."