[Air-l] ethics - aol data

[burkx006 at umn.edu]

On Aug 29 2006, Jim Porter wrote:

> Yes, Dan, but as you point out in your reference to digital music, 
> intellectual property is not subject to the scarcity limitations of 
> physical property. If I use your horse, you can't use it. If I copy your 
> words, no loss to you. What you said. Copying does not "steal" your 
> property in the same way. This is why I am troubled by the horse analogy. 
> (I would like to read your article. Can you send me a copy?)

What? You're not going to buy the AoIR Annual? With not only my article, 
but articles by Phil Agre, Barbara Warnick, Bill Dutton, Sheizaf Rafaeli, 
Susan Herring, Robin Mansell, and much, much more?

> With intellectual property there is no scarcity limitation (as Thomas 
> Jefferson and John Perry Barlow have pointed out), but there is an 
> incentive issue. If intellectual property can be copied without 
> recompense, credit, or capital, then what's the incentive for creators to 
> produce it? Here is where I am persuaded by the balance of copyright 
> arguments (Sandra Day O'Connor and others) and by term limits on 
> copyright (some reasonable length of time, not the Sonny Bono absurdity). 
> The 1976 Fair Use provision is an attempt to mediate this difference, 
> with its appeal to a common good, but it doesn't seem to be working 
> anymore, if it ever did, as a guide for content developers and content 
> borrowers of digital material.
>
>I guess I would like to see us move in the direction of a New Fair Use
>provision, one which addresses the specificities/peculiarities of digital
>material, rather than to slip into a uniform and elided notion of property
>that restricts/prohibits creativity.

The literature on this is, as the Hitchiker's Guide would say, big. Really 
big. You won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. But 
this is as good a place to start as any:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=204188

DLB

-- 
Dan L. Burk
Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor
University of Minnesota Law School
229 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN  55455
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