It may well be unwise to point out how unethical the keeping of slaves is to a slave owner, and similarly unwise to insinuate to a copyright holder that in suspending the liberty of people to copy his published works he may be compared to a slave owner.

I am doing neither, but slavery remains the best comparator to copyright and patent in terms of understanding why such commercial privileges are unethical.

If you understand why slavery is unethical (despite being commercially advantageous to slave owners and potentially in the best interests of the slaves in providing for their welfare and maximising their contribution to the community), then you understand why people have a natural right to liberty, and the state especially is to be prevented from diluting that right, no matter that its commercial exploitation may be argued as ultimately benefiting those whose liberty has been suspended to this end.

Bear in mind that copyright and patents are hangovers from the age of slavery, and there wasn’t quite so much rigour or enthusiasm to ensure that legislation restricted itself to protecting the people’s natural rights. An apparently insignificant suspension of the public’s liberty, to create copyright, will have then had little impact upon the liberty of the public at large in their daily lives, and legislators evidently did not foresee the information age, nor how copying, software development, and self-publishing would become the increasingly popular activities they are today.

Don’t get me wrong though, intellectual property per se is quite natural and ethical, and authors’/owners’ natural intellectual property rights should certainly be protected by the state, i.e. protection against theft and plagiarism. It’s just the privileges that are unethical, i.e. protection of exclusive reproduction/performance of published works.

The ethical deficit of copyright has long been recognised. I’m contributing nothing new, but simply answering the question as to how copyright is fundamentally unethical.

The ethics of copyright haven’t changed, but the effectiveness of it has. So all that’s happening today is that we’re gradually realising how impossible it is to prevent the public copying published works. And some of us are therefore wondering if it’s ethical to prosecute copyright infringers, no matter how naive, unwitting, or ignorant they are. That then leads to questioning whether copyright itself is ethical – for if it is, then sanction for draconian enforcement may be forgiven, and then argued to be more lenient given remedial education.

If in your questioning you discover that copyright is unethical, you then question whether you can ever use it yourself. Some of us decide we cannot.

“I will not accept the enslavement of my fellow man, nor any imposition upon his liberty, as reward for the publication of my art”

And if the state insists upon such a reward despite this principled rejection? Well, either one can declare a conscientious objection to the reward and an avowal to prevent its use, or better still, one can neutralise it, restoring the liberties so suspended, e.g. using a copyleft license such as the GPL or CC-SA, applying to all who rightfully possess one’s art or derivatives thereof.