Digital Rights Management and Ethics

A prevalent issue in our society that often makes me question my own moral standards is the topic of intellectual property rights, as it relates to music downloads via the internet. In recalling my youth, I remember when this issue was of no concern to major record labels that produce and distribute musical compositions. Originally, there was not a convenient or cost effective way for the consumer to make copies of vinyl records. When the magnetic cassette tape became the industry standard, the technology was now available for the masses to produce copies of their purchased music for distribution.

Established copyright laws that protect the recording industry's intellectual property from infringement have been in place for many decades. However, these corporations did not initially enforce them when new technology, that was easily accessible to public, became widely available. I suspect that this decision was based on cost benefit analysis of legally enforcing their rights. Moreover, the duplication process, by today's digital standards, was rudimentary. The process of duplicating a magnetic tape can be correlated to making a photo static copy of document Ð'- the copy is never quite a good as the original, and subsequent generations of copies will have lesser quality still.

Initially, it was not beneficial to the record companies' profitability to legally enforce their rights by seeking legal damages against those individuals who copied, distributed, or used for pleasure or profit, musical compositions without compensating the record companies. However, digital technology has advanced to the point that music duplication has no deteriorating effect on multiple generations of copies, and it has adversely affected the long term profitability of these corporations. The distribution, or sharing, of music is completely digital via the internet, which has made it easier for record companies to gather information on the illegal dissemination of their property by individuals. The foundation for legal action against those who violate their rights is more likely to withstand any challenge in a legal proceeding.

Prior to the advent of fully digitized music, the record companies, in my belief, encouraged individuals to violate their copyrights. The dissemination of music by artists under contract to their companies had an overall positive effect on their profitability. Individuals had become a marketing tool, in that they made more people aware of their products, by distributing lower grade versions of their products. From a purely financial prospective, they were able to spend less money on traditional marketing for their products, nor incur costly legal expense to defend their intellectual property, and they established goodwill with their consumer base by allowing them to use the property as they saw fit, even in violation of the law.

The record companies' reversal of their position on this question is strictly a factual one. Individuals who do not pay for the usage of these musical compositions are in violation of the laws of the land, and if it is determined that an individual infringed on their rights, the record companies should be compensated as established under the law. The moral aspect, in my opinion, is much more difficult to define in such stark terms. The theory of ethical relativism states that what is right is determined by the society as a whole. For almost thirty years, the duplication and sharing of music by individuals has been viewed as acceptable by societal norms, due in no small part to the inaction by these corporations to protect their intellectual property. To those ends, I feel that society does not believe that digital piracy is morally wrong, in spite of the fact these actions are known to be criminally liable.

In my own life, I have violated these laws and did not feel as if I was doing anything morally wrong. Initially, I saw the sharing of music with my friends as something I was allowed to do. The technology to duplicate cassettes was legal, rather inexpensive and readily available, and the record companies did not discourage me from doing it. If I liked a particular musical artist, I was more inclined to purchase the original product from traditional sources because I wanted to support