Introduction to Articles from the Third Annual Information Ethics Roundtable on Intellectual Property

Abstract

The following articles consider how our laws, practices, and policies with regard to authorship and intellectual property affect the production and dissemination of ideas and knowledge. The six papers included here-three full-length papers and a commentary on each paper-were originally presented at the Third Annual Information Ethics Roundtable (IER), which was held at Montclair State University in New Jersey.Every year the IER brings together scholars to discuss the ethical issues that arise in relation to the creation, organization, dissemination, and use of information and knowledge. Topics of past Roundtables have included Censorship, Privacy, Secrecy, and Cultural Property. Future Roundtables will be on topics such as Information Ethics and its Applications, Misinformation and Disinformation, and Consumer Health Information. The Third Annual IER presented participants from a number of disciplines, including philosophy, library and information science, law, and communications. It focused on issues of intellectual property and authorship, as do all of the articles included here.The first paper, by Alan Mattlage, deals with the question of how and whether intellectual property regimes can be ethically justified. Mattlage argues that neither the consequentialist nor the traditional liberal property justification provide an adequate ethical grounding for intellectual property. Mattlage makes the novel suggestion that intellectual property should be understood as what Radin calls i.e., property that is importantly connected to one's person or personhood (Mattlage, p. 22). Mattlage suggests that given the close link between ideas and the self (Mattlage, p. 25) the commodification of ideas may be much more morally problematic than traditionally has been thought. To the extent that a person's ideas are part of herself, Mattlage argues that it is not outlandish to compare the market in intellectual property to a market in body parts. Most specifically, Mattlage insists that the current state of academic publishing results in scholars being engaged in exchanges of the personal property in their ideas. In both the case of selling organs and relinquishing one's copyright to journals, those in weak power relations are forced into a coerced alienation of parts of themselves (be it organs or ideas).In his commentary, David Benfield argues that there is a significant disanalogy between the personal property of our body parts, on the one hand, and our intellectual productions, on the other. Organs are not easily replaceable and the original owners do not have any rights in the organs once they are sold. This is not true of intellectual works, however. It may be that ideas embodied in works are not easily replaceable or replicable. However, under copyright law one cannot own or sell an idea, only a particular embodiment of that idea in a poem, story, article, or work of art. Furthermore, authors still maintain some rights in their work, even once copyright has been transferred. Thus, while the current system of scholarly publishing may be unjust, it must be for quite different reasons from those that constitute the injustice of a market in body parts.The article by Don Fallis moves the discussion of intellectual property from how it can be ethically justified to how particular intellectual property policies can be epistemically justified. Following the U.S. Constitution's consequentialist justification of intellectual property, Fallis asks what sorts of policies, laws, and practices would produce the best epistemic consequences. He does not provide a single answer to this question, but notes a number of factors that would need to be weighed. …