Intellectual Property - Ethics for the Information Age - page 208

a decline in software production, which harms society. The strength of each of the links
in the chain is debatable; taken as a whole, the argument is not strong.
Our conclusion is that the arguments for granting intellectual property protection
for software are not strong. Nevertheless, our society has granted copyright protection
to owners of computer programs. If you violate a licensing agreement by copying a CD
containing a computer program and giving it to a friend, you are breaking the law. As
we discovered in Chapter 2, from the viewpoint of Kantianism, rule utilitarianism, and
social contract theory, breaking the law is wrong unless there is a strong overriding moral
obligation to do so.
4.10 Creative Commons
As we saw earlier in this chapter, some believe strong intellectual property protection
stimulates creativity by dangling the prospect of financial reward in front of artists and
inventors. Others believe that creativity is suppressed in such an environment. They
argue that people are more creative when they are free to build on the work of others.
Consider music, for example. It's not just rap musicians who sample the works of others
to create new songs. Listen to the classical piece Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copland
and you'll find that he used the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts.”
Information technology has created an environment in which an unprecedented
amount of creativity could be unleashed. Never before has it been so inexpensive to
record and mix music, combine photographs and computer-generated images, or tape
and edit movies. Wouldn't it be great to take what others have done and add your own
talents to produce even better works of art for everyone's enjoyment? Quoting the movie
Get Creative on the Creative Commons Web site: “Collaboration across space and time.
Creative co-authorship with people you've never met. Standing on the shoulders of your
peers. It's what the Internet is all about” [135].
Strong intellectual property protection, however, stands in the way of this vision.
Under current US copyright law, works of intellectual property are copyrighted the
moment they are made, even if the creator does not attach a copyright symbol © to the
work. Since copyright is implicit, permission is required before use. The current system
discourages people from building on the work of others.
Imagine the difficulty an art professor has trying to put together a Web site of images
for an online course! She needs to request permission for every image she wishes to
display on the Web site. Suppose there are three suitable images of Michelangelo's Pieta .
It may be impossible for her to tell in advance which, if any, of the photographers would
be willing to let her use the image. It would be better if there were an official way for a
photographer to say, “It's fine if you use this photograph, as long as you give me credit
for taking it.”
Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig realized there was a need for a system that
would allow producers of intellectual property to indicate to the world the rights they
wanted to keep. Lessig asks us to think about instances of the commons , a “resource
to which anyone within the relevant community has a right without obtaining the