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First off, what is a copyright? It is the right of an author to own the right to his work so that no other author can use his/her work without permission. So essentially it is a capitalist idea to protect a business' idea. It is sort of like a patent on ideas, if you will. So what does this have to do with philosophy? Plenty. Does a government have the right to say that you can't use something because someone has a patent on it? to a certain extent, it is like patenting an idea. There are many ways of going from this interpretation on the subject. First, can you patent a thought? Well, a thought in materialist terms is a chemical reaction that occurs between synapses in the brain. So essentially a copyright allows someone to own the chemical and synaptic combination that led to that thought. If you look at it from an idealist viewpoint a copyright give someone the right to a pure thought, and in idealism, everything is thought, so it could be said that to an idealist that is just like a patent for a materialist. OK, assuming that you say that you can patent a thought, the question becomes whether or not the government should be allowed to do this. This mainly stems from Capitalism. Giving someone protection for their work allows them to make money off their idea, and thus drives capitalism, so Capitalists support copyrights. Now Communists, though, don't support copyrights, and I doubt Anarchists do either since both are against governmental involvement in anything. Both groups would probably make the statement that it will be known to the public who initially came up with the idea and being the first to use it gives one a jump on competition and thus has the better chance of making money. Now this is no guarantee that a competitor won't advertise better or do something to make their version of your idea do better than yours like copyrights do. They would also say that the government would probably mess up in the assigning of copyrights and give it to the wrong people and hurt the person with the original idea, justifying even further that they are a bad idea. Now, assuming even more that you think the government can handle copyrights, the question becomes whether you should or not. Is it ethical to keep someone from using a certain idea just because you beat them to the punch? A good example of this is open source software. All programs have something called a source, which is just the code used to make the program. Now there is a movement online trying to push the idea that all software should be open source, which means that everyone should be able to see your source code and use it for free. Now obviously capitalist programmers have a problem with that since if people get access to their source code they can take there unique ideas and use them themselves and thus take away their advantage. Usually the response to this is that by opening up your source code you will have people helping you with your code so that you end up with a better program because others are helping you fix it. There is a copyright called the GNU General Public License for software. What this license says is that if you use any software under this license you have to make your cource code available to others since others allowed you to use their source code. Supporters of open source code also say you can still make money by selling a boxed version of your program and selling technical support. Being a programmer, I have often thought about this and there are some things that I have come up with. First, can you copyright bits of information? Since all programs are really just symbolic 1s and 0s in the computer, should somone be allowed to copyright a certain pattern of bits? Is that ethical? It is possible that I could randomly generate bits and end up with Windows 98. But I couldn't use it since it is copyrighted by Microsoft and I didn't pay them to allow me to use their copyrighted software. Also, should programmers be allowed to stifle the ideas of others or to hold back the development of programming because they want to make money off their idea? Should someone put their own monetary gain above advancing society's knowledge? Now I know that is a broad statement, but it is still true to a sense. No matter how you break this up, you are either one of two camps. Either you put money above the free distribution of ideas, or you prefer to have all ideas available to all at the risk of not having any monetary gain from your unique thought. It is a decision we all have to make on our own. |