The Right to Copyright

It’s a good thing there are copyright laws. Taking someone’s work of art and presenting it as your own is a despicable act. That is the moral side of it. But the other side is only about money, and from that perspective ethics is just a useful excuse for making profit.

In principle there is nothing wrong about copying something and selling it. Everything is more or less a copy anyway. For purely practical reason, though, it may be a good idea to protect certain products, otherwise the incentive to produce may be reduced and that may damage the social economy. But that is purely a business measure and there is nothing moral about it. Therefore it cannot be unethical to ignore such regulations, and for the individual consumer they are rather irrelevant.

By all means, buy copied products if they are cheap and safe! Don’t listen to producers who try to make you buy their goods by appealing to your moral feelings. It is rather suspicious when someone cares about morality only when it happens to be profitable, isn’t it?

They call it protection of intellectual property, but there is nothing intellectual or nothing artistic about a silly brand name or a piece of fashion clothing. Copyright laws are good for protecting the integrity of works of art; they should not be just another tool for money-making.