digital rights management ethical dilemmas

Search Engines and Online Libraries Content Creators There are several people who might fall into the class of people who create intellectual property. First, there are creatives, for example writers, visual artists, or even project managers such as directors or the team who write code for software. All of these are actively involved in the creative process. When they are doing as employees or contractors of a company, then typically the rights flow to the company, as the financier of the project.

But someone creating on their own should have full right to distribute as they please, whether or not this involves active digital rights management. There are examples of star acts that have sought to exert greater control over their work, using digital distribution models to bypass record companies. This is an example of a content creator exerting their natural control over how they distribute and control their work (Clemons, Gu, & Lang, 2002-2003).

Open source software provides a similar example, except where the content creator specifically denies their intellectual property rights. Producers The control over production processes often leaves content creators with a fee or set percentage of commission based on sales, with the rights holder actually being the company that financed the venture. These producers – music labels and academic journal publishers being two examples – claim themselves as category a. They are, however, not.

Their claim is based on legal precedent, which in turn is based on a capitalist logic that the entity that puts up the capital is taking the most risk, and therefore should receive the greatest share of the reward. Other schools of thought, however, such as socialist schools, argue that the control over production should be owned by the people. Even a softer view than what the 19th century communists envisioned would still apply creator rights to actual creators.

The royalty would go to the publisher/distributor, paid for their service. It is only disparity of bargaining power between creators and publishers that reverses this arrangement, but there is no ethical or moral reason why differences in bargaining power need to be codified into law. Producers have legal rights because of that codification, but I struggle to find a reasonable ethical argument that they should have such rights, and certainly would struggle to hold that those rights are inalienable and ethical.

End Users An end user in this case could be someone who enjoys a piece of music and wants to share it on YouTube for others to discover and enjoy. Or it could be an adult, no longer in university, who wishes to continue learning and requires access to the latest scientific research to do so. These individuals would fall into category b, someone who might use devices to bypass restrictions.

Such individuals fall into this category when they seek to obtain access to a work that they would otherwise need to pay for. I believe that they fall into the category because there are ethical issues raised when anyone – but especially the poor or otherwise disenfranchised – is denied access to something like knowledge. (I know that example is cherry-picking, but it is also where the greatest ethical dilemma lies).

Does this person have the right to access the latest journals on intellectual property ethics, regardless of what Elsevier wishes, if they will take that knowledge and benefit humanity through contributions to the conversation? I say that they do. Creators of Bypass People who create bypass mechanisms clearly fall into category B. They are often those driven by ethical duty to create these mechanisms.

They behave in line with their ethical duty, even when that duty specifically contradicts the ethical values of the majority – or in many cases simply those who influence lawmaking in a few select countries. There is an intense philosophical debate about one's obligations to follow laws (Green, 2003), given that one typically lives in a country that he or she did not explicitly consent to living in (having arrived by birth or as a child).

A natural extension of this in the digital rights arena is obligation to the laws of some other country – such as when a Kazakh creates a bypass in violation of US and UK law. Guardians of the Status Quo One of the interesting issues is a stakeholder who's role is primarily to serve as guardian of the status quo (or to reject that role, as the case may be).

Such an individual might be a professor who simultaneously assets that Wikipedia is not a valid source, but that students cannot use Sci Hub for their research either – the net result being that students are obligated to use paid methods of obtaining research. The availability of bypasses like Sci Hub has created significant ethical dilemma in the library community (Crissinger, 2017), because of these simultaneous claims that a) not all knowledge is created equal and b) peer-reviewed knowledge should not be freely available to all.

The guardians are in category b, as those whose role is to argue in favor or against bypasses – if nobody outside of journal boardrooms cared about Sci Hub, it would become a much more common tool, for example. Lawmakers Lawmakers are in category b. They assert a right that they gave themselves to create laws that render some means of accessing digital content legal, and other means illegal.

They are also often tasked with creating the institutions of enforcement for those laws- the institutions would be a different person in this context. The lawmakers have the ability to define what is acceptable behavior with respect to.