[Avodah] Copyright and Dina deMalkhuta

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2007 at 01:30:51PM +0100, Arie Folger wrote:
: Numerous posters have recently discussed the applicability of DDD (Dina 
: deMalkhuta) to copyright legislation...

It's not the only issue, though.

There is a long history of protecting the rights of published sefarim,
not allowing others to republish the material on their own. Hasagas
gevul was often invoked. This notion of trying to protect the publisher's
investment has strong parallels today. But the reasoning only works when
threatening the income of another Jew. There are charamim on people
who commit such breaches that well predates secular copyright law.

Also, the SuM's reasoning raises the notion of obeying the society's
moral code well beyond any limitations of DDD or even any loopholes in
any laws based on the moral stance.

This also gets to the issue of ve'asisa hatov vehayashar, where the din
is simply to be moral rather than the din defining specific behavior.
However, that's a topic for another post.

Tir'u baTov!
-mi

-- 
Micha Berger             "The worst thing that can happen to a
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