Digital Rights Management: Stakeholders and Ethics

Introduction: Content Creators and Intellectual Property

Several groups of people fall into the class of those who create intellectual property. First, there are creatives — writers, visual artists, and project managers such as directors or teams who write code for software. All of these individuals are actively involved in the creative process. When they work as employees or contractors of a company, the rights typically flow to the company as the financier of the project. However, someone creating independently should have full right to distribute their work 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 exercising natural control over how they distribute and manage their work (Clemons, Gu, & Lang, 2002–2003). Open source software provides a similar example, except that in this case the content creator specifically relinquishes their intellectual property rights rather than asserting them.

Producers and the Ethics of Rights Ownership

Control over production processes often leaves content creators with a fee or a set percentage of commission based on sales, while the rights holder is the company that financed the venture. These producers — music labels and academic journal publishers being two prominent examples — effectively claim themselves as primary rights holders. However, this claim rests on legal precedent rather than ethical principle. The underlying logic is capitalist: the entity that provides the capital takes the most risk and therefore should receive the greatest share of the reward.

Other schools of thought challenge this arrangement. Socialist perspectives, for example, argue that control over production should belong to the people. Even a more moderate position than that envisioned by nineteenth-century communists would still vest creator rights in actual creators, with royalties going to the publisher or distributor as payment for a service rendered. It is only the disparity of bargaining power between creators and publishers that reverses this arrangement. There is no ethical or moral reason why differences in bargaining power must be codified into law. Producers have legal rights because of that codification, but there is no compelling ethical argument that they should have such rights — and certainly no basis for holding those rights to be inalienable or morally justified.

End Users and Access to Knowledge

An end user in this context might 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 enrolled in university, who wishes to continue learning and requires access to the latest scientific research to do so. Such individuals fall into the category of those who might use devices or tools to bypass access restrictions — specifically when they seek to obtain access to a work they would otherwise need to pay for.

Significant ethical issues arise when anyone — but especially the poor or otherwise disenfranchised — is denied access to knowledge. Does a person have the right to access the latest academic journals on intellectual property ethics, regardless of what a publisher such as Elsevier wishes, if they will apply that knowledge to benefit humanity through contributions to public discourse? The argument presented here is that they do. The ethical dilemma is sharpest where knowledge itself is the resource being restricted, since the social costs of that restriction fall most heavily on those least able to pay.

Conclusion

There are many types of individuals who fall into either category A or category B, and this is typically defined by their actions. Sometimes an individual falls into both categories simultaneously — as in the case of Led Zeppelin seeking to enforce copyright over its own works, including compositions drawn from the blues tradition. In many cases, the ethical obligations of these individuals fall into a grey area, subject to different forms of interpretation, which is precisely why digital rights management is such a complex issue.