Ethics and links
I ran across this old post of mine from a previous blog.
Tim O’Reilly has some lessons he’s learned from book publishing and how they might apply to the current furor over music and movie piracy.
- Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
- Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation.
- Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation
- Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
- Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
- Lesson 5: File sharing networks don’t threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
- Lesson 6: “Free” is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.
- Lesson 7: There’s more than one way to do it.
Also see The Free Expression Project for more on copyright and free expression.
Jaimie and I like to discuss various ethical questions. Fortunately we agree, or at least don’t violently disagree, on most of them. Anyhow, this site looks to have some interesting resources on contemporary ethics problems.