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Mind the Gap! How the Digital Turn Upsets Intellectual Property

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Abstract

Intellectual property is one of the highly divisive issues in contemporary philosophical and political debates. The main objective of this paper is to explore some sources of tension between the formal rules of intellectual property (particularly copyright and patents) and the emerging informal norms of file sharing and open access in online environments. We look into the file sharing phenomena not only to illustrate the deepening gap between the two sets of norms, but to cast some doubt on the current regime of intellectual property as an adequate frame for the new type of interactions in online environments. Revisiting the classic Arrow–Demsetz debate about intellectual property and the epistemological issues involved in assessing institutions, we suggest that seeking out new institutional arrangements aligned with the norms-in-use seems to be a more promising strategy in the new technological setting than attempting to reinforce the current legal framework. Moreover, such a strategy is less prone to committing the so-called ‘Nirvana fallacies’. As a secondary task, we try to cast some doubt on the two most common moral justifications of intellectual property as being able to ground the full extent of the current intellectual property regime.

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Notes

  1. Google daily updates the figures here: https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright (last accessed on May 24th, 2017).

  2. The study was conducted by MUSO and some of its findings published by TorrentFreak in 2016: https://www.torrentfreak.com/europe-has-the-highest-online-piracy-rates-by-far-160801/ (last accessed on May 24th, 2017).

  3. Which states that “if one of the Paretian optimum conditions cannot be fulfilled a second best optimum situation is achieved only by departing from all other optimum conditions” (Lipsey and Lancaster 1956, quoted in Wiens 2016).

  4. There are some closed groups on Facebook (but not only) where researchers with inadequate access to scientific material ask more privileged people to send them, by email, copies of different articles (but not books). Because this is happening in a grey zone of copyright, we prefer not to name the groups.

  5. The rest of this section is based on an argument one of us has proposed before in (Vică 2015, 328–332).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation, CNCS – UEFISCDI, Project Number PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-1846. We are deeply indebted to our colleagues Cristina Voinea, Anda Zahiu, Maria Banu, Ingrid Niculescu, Alexandra Oprea, Toni Gibea and especially Emilian Mihailov and Radu Uszkai. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Splaiul Independenţei nr. 204, Bucharest, Romania

    Constantin Vică & Emanuel-Mihail Socaciu

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  1. Constantin Vică
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  2. Emanuel-Mihail Socaciu
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Correspondence to Constantin Vică.

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Vică, C., Socaciu, EM. Mind the Gap! How the Digital Turn Upsets Intellectual Property. Sci Eng Ethics 25, 247–264 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-9996-x

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