what moral obligation? (Re: DRM technology and policy)

[Adam Back]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 10:32:29AM -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> There *IS* still a moral obligation to pay the "artist" (creator of a
> work).  

Why?  That sounds like charity at the point of a gun, not a moral
obligation.  Before copyright your view would have appeared strange.

Currently it seems on the face of it reasonable, but I argue only
because that's the current system and we're used to it.  It has no
moral grounding, and significant amoral effects in it's enforcement:
erosion of individual freedoms, students and so on being made an
example of, the Skylarov case.

> This about it this way: if <insert your favorite musical artist here>
> never got paid for their work, what incentive would they have to
> continue making music?  

If it's your favorite artist that is your problem.  You can sponsor
him, you can pay to attend his live performances, you can pay for
physical media with his content perferring to buy versions where he
gets a royalty vs content distributors content.

> Adam, I don't know exactly what you do for a living, but would you
> continue to do it if people morally felt that they should not pay
> you for doing it?

Crypto software; yes I'd probably continue doing it absent being paid
because it's what I enjoy; I've written a number of open source
packages.

However I think the argument is less black and white.  If it were
truly the case that the software industry would collapse, no more
movies would be producted, no more music, then that would be an
argument that the current copyright laws (or perhaps some less
draconian prior version of them) is a necessary evil.  However as I
described in response to Peter, I don't think these industries would
cease; they may look somewhat different, get different proportions of
their revenue from different business models; but I think the net
result would be positive.

As you agree that the current copyright expansion is bad, also I'd be
interested to hear other ideas for how to reform copyright.

Adam

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