I would like to respond in greater depth to the question raised in class about the actual concept of ownership, especially of something in a digital medium, such as via the internet. With the advent of the internet came new problems, as we discussed, about the concept of ownership. One of the first ideas developed in class, was the idea that any item saved on one's hard disk can be considered ownership, consequently the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled something very similar, that having a digital "negative" meaning possessing an actual copy of the photo, in such a form that it can be manipulated by the individual, much like a tangible negative, confers ownership of that photograph to the individual. This is especially true if the individual has paid, either for access to the photo or for the actual photo itself, any fee. I would also look to expand this to cover the ideas of Cara's post, Photography and the Internet, and the idea that the only way to have actual ownership is to have some form of copyright to the actual picture. In one way, this is very true, especially if the photo is to be published the original photographer will copyright the photo, but this is done more so that the individual will receive credit and compensation for the photograph. In addition, I do not believe that it is required for an individual to hold the rights to a specific photo in order to be in possession of it, or in this case to "own" it.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Ownership of Digital Media
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
That's a good point: the discussion in class concerned "possession" more than it concerned "ownership."
ReplyDeleteBut even this confusion is interesting from the point of view in Raz's analysis. In class, I mentioned that by "own" I meant "possession" thereby establishing a factual interpretive convention for substituting "possess" for every instance of "own" contained in our hypothetical statute.
Raz would say that we are only permitted to draw such conclusions when we can refer to a factual mode of of interpretation that authorizes them. An incorporationist, for instance, might disagree by insisting that we can interpret a statute using any logical interpretation that can be derived from the law's core instance. From another point of view the natural law theorist would say that we need to know something about the instances that the legislator meant or ought to have meant to cover in crafting the statute.
The question that Raz's account raises is why we would prefer methods of interpretation established by the fact that they were used by relevant legal authorities? Why not expand legal interpretation to whatever can be logically inferred from a legal rule? Why not try to find out what acts and what circumstances a law was intended to cover?