Copyrights and Piracy

            There were days in the past when if somebody stole your work and claimed to be the original author, you could do nothing but prove by some means that it is in fact your own work. If the original papers too were stolen, you could only try to persuade people to believe you. It is entirely possible that many people with malicious intents or out of greed might have taken credit for others’ work, and who knows some of the famous works might have been works of some unknown geniuses. Some might say that it would be absurd to claim such a thing, but I am just trying to point that in those days you could not protect your work in advance and there were no specific legal provisions for that too. It is not very long before the concepts of Copyrights (legal protection given to the original author of an intellectual work), Piracy (use and/or distribution of work without authorized permission or author’s knowledge) and Intellectual Property (the right to own your intellectual creations) came out.   

            The present business world is very competitive. Now, there are not only physical sites to sell your products, but you can sell productions online i.e. e-commerce. People can find the different types of products at just a mouse click, and even if they choose to buy on physical sites, they are very selective regarding the products and their features. Therefore, it is very important for a business to make their products stand-out and be able to compete in the market. For that, the businesses work very hard, come up with innovative ideas and materialize them into revolutionary products, with an equal probability of failure. However, it is possible that after some success a competitor might use the same idea, which took literally years of investment and research, and without same level of hard work or risk, make the same amounts using that concept. Thus, it is very important to protect your intellectual property and register the copyright. Doing this would force other businesses to think twice before using your ideas, or at least give you a good deal for legal permission to use it.

Ethics and Deontological Theories

The part of philosophy that deals with the issues of “good” is called Ethics. It deals with the moral principles that influence our actions. There are many viewpoints and theories on Ethics and one of them are “Deontological Theories”.

Deontological theories are non-consequentalist theories which do not give importance to the result of any ethical decision (Alexander, L., Moore, M., 2012). They rather give importance to moral norms and that our actions should conform to those norms regardless of the consequence. The main idea of not keeping the consequence at the focal point is that is it not always desirable. Even a morally wrong action or decision can produce better results but that does not reflect that we are “good”. For example, we can take a situation when somebody with malicious intentions takes an action to do something bad, which fortunately does something good. According to consequentalist theories, this might be ethically correct because the result is good. However, we know that the person had bad intentions. So, this is pointed out by Deontological theories. Such actions cannot be morally correct because even though the consequence is good, it was not meant to be good.