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Digital Rights

a) Sonderholm (2010) describes intellectual property rights as "a socio-economic tool that creates a temporary monopoly", specifically as a means to allow creators to earn profit, which in theory will incentivize more creation.
On the issue of digital rights management versus the public's right to fair use, there are several issues to unpack. First is that a person who creates intellectual property has no obligation to do anything with it. In fact, there are vast reservoirs of unpublished novels, unfilmed screenplays, photographs, drawings…a vast amount of the intellectual property that is created is never brought to the public at all, and still more would be if there were means to do so provided to the creator.

But should a creator decide to bring their work to the public sphere, they and only they should have the right to determine how that work is delivered to the public. It is unethical for a lawmaker, for example, to dictate that a content creator should release that content via any one mechanism – the right should rest solely with the content creator. There have long been legal systems that protect intellectual property, and for the most part those systems function within the context of a legal environment that places the onus on the content creator to defend his/her own work. For example, if somebody plagiarizes this paper, it would be my job as author to defend utilize the court system to defend my property rights. If I choose not to, then that is my choice, and the state should never intervene in my right to choose if and when I want to defend my intellectual property rights.

There are several arguments to be made against the use of digital rights management technology. First, most obviously, is that a third party that/who did not participate in the creation of the work shouldn't have property rights to it – if you didn't create it, it's not yours. Why this is even a question before law is the result of amazing intellectual gymnastics.

Beyond that, however, there is the simple matter that intellectual property is different from other property in several key ways. It is non-rivalrous, meaning that it is not diminished by its consumption (Moore & Himma, 2014). This is a key distinction from physical property, because it means that most intellectual property can theoretically be consumed by all human beings simultaneously. While Moore offers sophomoric slippery slope arguments against the non-rivalrous argument, Himma reasonably points out that the non-rivalrous nature of something like digital property does not imply rights to consumption. That said, the fact that there are no barriers to consumption, and that consumption of the good does no objective harm to anybody, means that charging a cost for access to intellectual property is immoral, if a superior outcome would be achieved by not charging. As Masnick (2010) rightly points out, a moral dilemma is where there is a choice in the allocation of harm; freeing up intellectual property often results in no added harm, only added benefit, negating the moral dilemma altogether.

This leads to another important dimension of this argument, the utilitarian. In many instances, intellectual property would produce greater results for the greatest number. This is likely true for entertainment forms (more people being entertained is a good thing) as well as for more patently obvious examples like academic journal articles. The latter is an extreme example, but hammers home the point – when you hide knowledge behind a paywall, denying most of humanity access to that knowledge, and you aren't even the researcher who produced the work, you are committing an egregious crime against humanity. Taylor (2013) takes an equally strong, if less hyperbolic, stance, but the point is the same. Scholarship benefits from more scholars having access to more information, and that is to say nothing of the damage done to non-scholars by shutting them off from entire fields of discourse. We decry ignorance while defending the right of people to erect barriers to the elimination of ignorance.

Telling people "you're not allowed to learn that because you're not rich enough" is the same classist, racist, sexist nonsense that humanity has suffered from for its history, and they good people are trying to work to eliminate. Hiding knowledge that would benefit many, in the name of profit, is morally indefensible. It is not as though the lack of financial incentive would eliminate intellectual curiosity, or the creation of creative works.

There is a final dynamic to the issue, however. Intellectual property covers both ideas, and the products that arise from those ideas. This adds a new wrinkle- for example it is said there are no new ideas in fiction. But there are new works of fiction, and those are protected. It is reasonable to protect each iteration of an idea as unique, but not the core ideas, to the extent that the creator chooses to. It should not be mandatory by law, and there are significant ethical issues with utilizing a rights management system to hide any idea that would have a net benefit on humanity if it was to be released free of paywall. If human beings aren't willing to help other human beings for the betterment of all society, those people are behaving unethically by utilitarianism, and probably by deontological ethics as well, in denying superior outcomes to others.

b) People absolutely should develop devices and software to remove digital rights restrictions. I do not think that anybody has an ethical or legal obligation to do so, however. That would seem to imply that anybody capable of developing such tools has a right or obligation to develop them, and I disagree with that. Each person has talents, and there are probably millions of people with the particular talent to develop such tools. The reality is that each person should utilize their talents in the best possible way, and for many that will be to put their energies into other things because developing tools to remove digital rights management restrictions.

So the question is perhaps framed poorly. Nobody who has the ability has obligation to do this, any more than someone who has the ability to cook a nice meal is obligated to work as a chef. That good cook might be talented at other things that have even more value to humanity. Flip the question around, however, and you arrive with whether or not it is ethical to produce such tools. This is an interesting question. To the extent that the creator of the work controls its rights, it could be argued that breaking that control is unethical because it denies the ability of the creator to profit from the creation. This is something that those who create intellectual property struggle with - how much is right to earn from their works. A living is assumed, as that would allow them to continue to produce works. The utilitarian framework supports the ability of someone to earn a living from his or her work. The utilitarian framework might, however, not support earning beyond that if it means denying the benefit of those works to a much wider audience. Where the work is entertainment, it is easier to argue in favor of maintaining intellectual property rights. Where the work has greater value to humanity – the finer works of literature or film would be included here, along with scholarly research – then denying access to propagate needless wealth runs into stickier ethical ground.

If the tool used to free the work for the mass public denies the creator the ability to make a living, and thus causes the creator to discontinue this form of work, there might be a case that creating such a tool is unethical. However, this is an unlikely outcome – on average, such a tool will do more good than harm by allowing ideas to flow freely among humanity. That makes such a tool ethical. One is by no means obligated to produce the tool, but it is not unethical to produce the tool.

This stance abuts the position that people who hold intellectual property rights have a right to earn a living from them. If the people are not the actual content creator, that right is a fiction. But even for a content creator, the reality is that there is no inherent right to earn a living via a specific means. A living can be earned any number of different ways, and if one means is not profitable, then one should be free, and in most societies is free, to pursue other means of earning a living. For someone who didn't even create the IP in question, they can definitely make money someplace else, but even a content creator has the right to choose the best way to earn an income. Denying someone the ability to earn a specific income a specific way is not at all unethical – people are turned down from jobs they've applied to all the time.

All told, where one stands on the issue really reflects one's ethics. A more individualistic system of ethics allows for exploitation of ideas for profit, even if those ideas would serve humanity better in a system with no restrictions on their use. A system of ethics like utilitarianism that places emphasis on the good of all humanity, or the larger portion of it, recognizes that free flow of ideas is generally beneficial and that any system that restricts that flow, especially for something as petty as greed, is not ethical, and that the only ethical stand is to be against such a system.


References

Masnick, M. (2010) Is intellectual property itself unethical? TechDirt. Retrieved April 21, 2018 from https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100519/0404029486.shtml

Moore, A. & Himma, K. (2014) Intellectual property. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved April 21, 2018 from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intellectual-property/#GenCriIntPro

Sonderholm, J. (2010) Ethical issues surrounding intellectual property rights. Philosophy Compass. Vol. 5 (12) 1107-1115.

Taylor, M. (2013) Hiding your research behind a paywall is immoral. The Guardian. Retrieved April 21, 2018 from https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/jan/17/open-access-publishing-science-paywall-immoral