This week’s faculty seminar features presentation by Ana Enriquez, Head of the Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright, Penn State University Libraries, and Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, NLSIU, on ‘Conflating Copyright and Ethics.’

Abstract

In resources about copyright law for lay audiences, it is common to conflate acting ethically with following copyright law. Rather than encouraging ethical behavior, this trope shuts down the audience’s ethical reasoning. Nor does this trope encourage learning about copyright law. Instead, it leads to several misunderstandings: it encourages people to think that all copyright wrongs are equivalent; it ignores the variety of approaches to copyright, such as those of other countries or times; and it hides copyright law’s flaws. The solution is not to excise ethical reasoning from discussions of copyright law. The solution is to disentangle the two topics and pay adequate attention to both.

This paper first demonstrates the trope, presenting four examples. Second, it explores the costs of this trope in terms of our understanding of the law. Third, it considers the consequences of overcorrecting in response to this trope, using as an example a U.S. case involving the enforcement of a French copyright judgment. Finally, it offers an antidote to one of the examples from the beginning of the paper, spending time with the ethical questions it raised.

This draft is also available publicly.