-- On 5 Jul 2002 at 3:10, Nomen Nescio wrote:
Suppose you know someone who has been working for years on a novel. But he lacks confidence in his work and he's never shown it to anyone. Finally you persuade him to let you look at a copy of his manuscript, but he makes you promise not to show any of it to anyone else.
Hopefully it is clear in this situation that no one is doing anything "evil". Even though he is giving you the document with conditions beyond those specified in the current regime of copyright, he is not taking advantage of you. Even though you hold the bits to his manuscript and he has put limitations on what you can do with them, he is not coercing you. You voluntarily accepted those conditions as part of the agreement under which you received the document.
It should also be clear that it would be ethically wrong for you to take the manuscript and show it to other people. Even if you take an excerpt, as allowed under "fair use" exemptions to copyright protection, and include it in a document for commentary or review purposes, that would be a violation of your promise. This example demonstrates that when two people reach a mutual agreement about how they will handle some information, they are ethically bound by it even beyond the regulations of copyright law.
Let us make a more realistic supposition: Let us suppose instead he organized an entertainment where a lightly clad singer sang and danced, and showed that video on television interspersed with advertisments, and I then captured that video on my hard disk, deleted the ads, and put it on the internet. In that case, where is my promise? Doubtless I must have made it in the same moment of forgetfulness as I signed the social contract. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG bAhnMLd4HxDL/1pvlkk6Ga1VpR1eMM5jp1ff+rbD 2k/NTfC76YawZx8bnVYHGPHiRnNt5axoRlaDUDJP8