Copying as Compensation: Dispensing the Disadvantaged from Copyright Restrictions
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Copying as Compensation
Dispensing the Disadvantaged from Copyright Restrictions
Amrei Bahr
Legal copyright restrictions aim at protecting the interests of those who author
and publish works' by regulating the use of these works. They regulate acts of
copying since these acts and their results are potentially harmful to the authors and
publishers of works. When it comes to acts of copying that aim at accessing works,
the potential damage primarily relates to the fact that the emerging copies can most
often satisfy the demands that would otherwise be satisfied by original exemplars
of the respective works.2 Hence, acts of copying can pose a serious threat to authors
and publishers. I take it that authors and publishers generally have a morally justi-
fied interest in hindering certain acts of copying that would result in a limitation
of their options to profit from the works they have authored or published.3 From an
1 In legal contexts, the works that are relevant here are referred to with terms such as original
work of authorship (in US copyright law, see 17 US Code § 102, identifying original works of
authorship as the subject matter of copyright law and also comprising a non-exhaustive list of
different categories of works, e.g. sound recordings and architectural works), copyright work
(in British copyright law 1 (1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 exhaustive-
ly lists the categories that copyright works can belong to, namely original, literary, dramatic,
musical, or artistic works, sound recordings, films, broadcasts, and the typographical arrange-
ment of published editions), or Werk (in German copyright law § 2 UrhG exemplarily and
non-exhaustively mentions seven categories of works protected by copyright law, namely liter-
aiy works including speeches [even if they are not fixed in any tangible medium], academic pub-
lications and computer software, musical works, pantomimic works including works of dance,
artistic works including works of architecture and of applied art and drafts of such works, pho-
tographic works, cinematographic works, and illustrations of a scientific or technical nature).
2 InEnglish, the word copy is often used inabroad sense in which it can also refer to origi-
nal exemplars of a work, such as in the sentence I bought a copy of her recent book. However,
this is not the sense of copy that is relevant here: in this paper, I will use the word copy in a
narrow sense in which it only refers to non-original objects, like in the sentence The painting I
bought is not an original, it is just a copy. In this narrow sense, the word copy coincides with
the German word Kopie. Fora definition of copy inthis narrow sense, seeAmreiBahr, What
Is an Artefact Copy? A Quadrinomial Definition, in: Darren Hudson Hick/Reinold Scumicker
(eds.), The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying, New York/London 2016, pp. 81 98.
3 I have argued elsewhere that authors have a moral entitlement to profit from their works
insofar as these works are the results of achievements that merit rewards. In the absence of
other rewards, e.g. in the form of monetary compensation, authors should be rewarded for these
achievements by being in charge of their works at their discretion, see Amrei Bahr, Was heil~t:
,ein Artefakt illegitim kopieren'? Grundlagen einer artefaktbezogenen Ethik des Kopierens,](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jaret26&div=17&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Copying as Compensation: Dispensing the Disadvantaged from Copyright Restrictions
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