[Upd-discuss] "Development", "freedom", and UPD's objectives

[Peter Eckersley]

On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 12:03:14PM -0400, Richard M. Stallman wrote:
>     What will we answer when someone will demonstrate that there are  
>     better tools than PD to help developing third-world countries ?
> 
> I agree with you that we have to be very careful when we cite
> development as the justification for copyright or patent law.  It's a
> possible benefit, but we can't judge them solely by their benefits,
> we have to consider the price society pays for them too.
> 
> My response would be that "help" is not defined just in economic terms,
> and that people in these countries deserve respect for their freedom
> as much as people anywhere else.

This is an important philosophical position which could have some subtle
but not entirely trivial consequences for the kinds of copyright and
patent policies which UPD aims to promote.

There are different objectives which one can regard to be of fundamental
ethical importance, and which thereby become standards against which we
should judge policy proposals in areas such as copyright and patent law.

Four important examples of those objectives are (1) `welfare' or
`utility', (2) justice, (3) negative freedom and (4) positive freedom.
There are others, of course -- such as `knowledge' or `development' -- but
this email will be long enough as is.  It may be of value to UPD to have
some kind of charter or statement setting out where it stands on the
relationship between ethical goals, because discussions about them have
affected the Board's ability to make quick decisions on our activities
and public statements.

I'll say a minimal amount about each of the four objectives:

1. `Welfare' or `utility' is a widely promoted goal of policy.  This
position, called utilitarianism, is supposed to generalise from our
intuitions about happiness and fulfilment.  Some argue that economics
has twisted these concepts by usually defining them as `giving
people what they want'.  In any case, a utilitarian analysis of
copyright and patent law would give users far more rights than they
presently enjoy, but tends not to raise in-principle objections to
surrendering some rights if users (for example) end up with a
net-benefit in the amount and quality[*] of software they use or books
they read.

[*] the ability to modify software clearly increases its quality at
least for those with hacking resources

2. Justice is one of the strongest philosophical justifications for
relatively strong copyright and patent laws.  We could pinch a
concept from Rawls to define justice by asking what we would like to
happen if we placed ourselves in a random person's shoes.  If I were
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I would very much like my efforts to be rewarded
by the royalty cheques that plucked him out of poverty.  I might want
that enough to surrender the higher price of his books, were I a reader.
Of course, justice still gives many grounds to criticise TRIPs or the
major music industry because of the injustices they visit upon the
poor/information-poor and musicians respectively.

3. `Negative freedom' is the freedom from restraints.  This is the kind of
freedom that RMS has argued should have an essential place in our
policies.  In this theory, it may be bad to have someone stop you from
modifying or copying something, even if your use of that freedom is
only rare and slightly beneficial in terms of utility or knowledge gained.  

4. `Positive freedom' is the practical ability to do things.  Positive
freedoms can be harmed by negative restraints, but only to the extent
that a person would have used them anyway.  Positive freedoms also
depend on what resources one has.  So it might sometimes be good to have
piece of proprietary software created if the extra choices it gives are
valuable to people AND it does not suppress others' choices by,
for example, locking up protocols and file formats.

It might be good for UPD to have some brief set of principles which give
us at least an implicit way of balancing these objectives.  I'll put
my 2 cents about what that might be in a separate email.  But I guess
the main point is that it would be great if some consensus could develop
on the upd-discuss list around such a statement.

-- 
Peter Eckersley
Department of Computer Science   &                  mailto:pde@cs.mu.oz.au 
IP Research Institute of Australia             http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~pde
The University of Melbourne