From: gwtmp01@...
Date: 2006-05-17T07:32:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Ticked Off [OT]


On May 16, 2006, at 5:58 PM, Ryan Leavengood wrote:
> Earlier in this thread, Michael Greenly clearly stated his problem was
> not with the authors who use the copyright system to their advantage,
> but with the copyright system itself, which is an artificial creation
> of society

So let's assume that copyright didn't exist. Could an author produce  
a book and then offer access to it via standard contract law?  If  
that contract prohibited the duplication and/or distribution of the  
work would we consider violation of that contract (i.e. illegal  
sharing of the work) to be 'wrong' or 'unethical'?

It seems to me, and I'm just thinking out loud here, that the ethical  
question exists independent of our current copyright framework as  
long as you still have the concept of contract law.  IMNAL but  
copyright seems to me to be like a pre-packaged contract between the  
creator of a work and its users.  You could get rid of the pre- 
packaged nature but the restrictions could be recreated by an  
explicit contract and I think all the same ethical issues would re- 
assert themselves.

In reading and participating on this thread I found it very  
interesting that there was not much consensus on the usefulness of  
copyright, on the concept of market based prices, on the ethics of  
free trade, in fact the entire range of economic theories and  
contract/real/intellectual property law seemed to come out of the  
woodwork for this discussion.

Very interesting.


Gary Wright