Infonaut's Journal: An interesting dilemma

I'm prepping for fall law school exams, and a member of my study group emails the URL to another law school's site. It contains a bunch of old exams and sample answers, but the header at the top of the page says:

The sample exams and exercises on this page are made available for the sole purpose of assisting students of the X College of Law in their preparation for examinations. Any other use is prohibited. Copyright is retained by the authors.

I'm a firm believer in open source, limiting copyright terms, and restricting the reach of patents. But I also believe that the creator of a work should be given the right to chose the degree of copyright protection they place on their work.

I doubt very much that this university would take the effort to hunt me down and prosecute me, should I make use of the exams and answers for my own purposes. There are probably also dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people around the world using these materials in contravention of the wishes of the people who created them.

Still, I can't bring myself to do it. The mantra "Information wants to be free" makes sense in a larger, abstract sense. But sometimes in application the phrase is a bit like the oft-heard assumption, "Everything happens for a reason." Sure, it happens for a reason. You just assign the reason for the event after it occurs, subconsciously, without even realizing it. Information may want to be free, but that is only true because we humans want it to be.

Please help me understand

[Concern]

What if the copyright required readers to prance naked down the street?

What if it allowed only black people to read the document?

We already acknowledge that there are limits on copyright powers. The remaining question is where those limits lie. If the current rules produce obviously wrong results, change the rules.

Let's just cut to the chase. We should enumerate exactly what a copyright holder has the power to do. _Exactly_ what. A whitelist, in engineering parlance.

I contend that a law school publishing in

Re:Please help me understand

[Infonaut]

I contend that a law school publishing information on the web, but then adding a ridiculous copyright, goes against common sense and human nature. If they intend for something to be a secret of some kind, keep it secret. If they fail to do so, it's their loss.

Hmm.. It may go against common sense, in the same way that leaving your front door unlocked goes against common sense. But I don't really buy the argument that somehow because I want the information they are providing, I am within my rights in using

Re:Please help me understand

[Concern]

I propose an alternate analogy that I think addresses a problem with your copy machine scenario.

What if instead this student published their work in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Lexis Nexis (where it would probably be seen by considerably fewer interested parties than if they simply put it on the web where it will be uniformly indexed by google) - but with that same note on top.

Is that an ethical dilemma? Or a practical joke?

This is the least troubling ethical dilemma I've considered sin

Re:Please help me understand

[Infonaut]

I think a few people want to change our legal and cultural norms to some outrageous new standards, so the content trust and some members of the legal profession can make a few more pennies.

I agree with you that the content industry is trying hard to change the legal structure so that fair use becomes increasingly restricted. Hell, I'm sure many of them would remove it completely if they could. I also agree that we would not be even thinking about the ethics of sharing information if it weren't for the ri

Re:Please help me understand

[Concern]

Does their failure to observe common sense mean that you should be free to take their written works and use them even though it was manifestly their intent that you not do so?

Of course!

Imagine that tomorrow a cabal of attorneys and modeling agencies band together and begin to pretend as if there has always been an inalieable right to charge people to look at other people. "If you don't pay, you can't look."

Well, you can hide if you don't want to be seen, and sell autographed pictures at the gate of your est