Justifications For Copyright
Legal scholars often approach copyright in search of a coherent ethical justification for its existence and character. This approach may seem to be backwards—it might make more sense to start with an objective and then examine the law against it—but it is widely practised. Thus, the normative or ethical theories that might naively be regarded as tests for copyright law to pass are often called `justifications' of it. Justifications for copyright can generally be approximated into two groups: deontological or consequentialist. Deontological justifications for copyright seek to justify copyright as a matter of rights or duty, they seek to assert a justification for copyright (or intellectual property more generally) on the basis that it is morally correct to do so. Contrariwise, consequentialist theories of copyright seek to justify or criticise copyright protection based on the consequences of that protection, by asserting or providing evidence that the protection of copyright produces some desirable effect. Examples of such theories include incentives theories that view intellectual property as a necessary way of incentivising the creation of new creative works.
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