It occurs to me that I have not given adequate thought to what I mean by calling my work this semester a study on intellectual property ethics. This is largely due to my civilian understanding of ethics itself. Like anyone, I understand that ethical questions are those of right and wrong, of value and morals. But it seems insufficient to conduct my thinking here in the meager framework of the "rightness and wrongness" of intellectual property law.
To the end of developing a more robust ethical system with which to consider IP issues, I've done a brief survey of ethics via selected readings and have come to what I think is a workable understanding.
My interests here lay somewhere between information and legal ethics, and normative and applied ethics. I will describe that approach taken here as first making a serious of brief normative assertions about information ethics, and then considering intellectual property law in terms of the way in which it does or does not match up with the legal codification of of those information values.
Admittedly, my grasp of ethics and the framework here is crude and perhaps overly intuitive, but I will present it as it is, and continue to think on it as I continue.
The normative stance on information ethics informing my analysis is straightforward and likely familiar to citizens of open societies. It is at its heart a mirror of the the previously mentioned American "information ethos" and the doctrine of fair use. In the interests further developing it, I will rearticulate the framework after finishing "Digital Copyright".
For now, I will vaguely state the dieal normative conditions as those in which:
1.) Creative workers control the ways in which their copyrighted works are attributed when directly used in other works.
2.) Creative workers control the the direct use of their copyrighted works in commercial or other profit making uses.
3.) Individuals private use of information is non-regulated in terms of copyright violations.
4.)Not-for-profit uses demonstrably engaged in the public good are not regulated.
