Communication Ethics
Part of: The Ethics of Modern Communication
Communication Ethics book part for Sender Control Over Message. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

And thus we come to the crux of this essay. What restrictions are the senders allowed to lay on the receivers with regard to what the receivers can do with their messages? I see several distinct issues:

  1. Can it be received at all? The sender may not send the message at all until (s)he is paid. Or they may not want to send it at all. Or they may not be allowed to keep a message to themselves. Are there provisions of standard contract law that can not be ethically applied to communication?
  2. What is the receiver allowed to do with the message themselves? Can they archive it? Do they have anything like "Fair Use" rights? Can they manipulate the message as they please (fast forward, rewind, etc.), or are there constraints on how they can experience it?
  3. Can #1 and #2 interact? Is the sender allowed to discriminate based on what the receiver will do with the message, or not? For example, is it ethical to charge a Pay-Per-View customer twice for seeing the same content twice? Or is it the case that once the message is sent, the sender no longer has an interest in what the receiver does with it? As a practical example, is requiring the use of Digital Restrictions Management hardware and software by a receiver ethical?
  4. To whom may the receiver forward the message to, and under what circumstances? This certainly interacts with #1, in that the sender may refuse to send the message at all if the receiver insists on being able to post it freely on their web page, but is also worth considering on its own, because there may be special limitations on the kind of restrictions a sender can place on the receiver. For instance, traditional "Fair Use" is covered here; I can forward a small snippet with commentary under certain limited conditions, and there is nothing the sender can do about it ethically. Can I manipulate the forwarded messages (i.e., use a snippet of video in my television program vs. the whole thing)? In what manner?
  1. I can't think of any particular restrictions in contract law that would be unethical to apply to communication, as long as symmetry is preserved and subject to the exception in my next answer. The fundamental problem with EULAs, in my final analysis, lies not with their existence, but with their rampant abuse of the asymmetry between the sender and receiver, exacerbated by things like UCITA. I mean, come on, agreeing to a contract that is physically impossible to see until you've opened the package and thereby "agreed" to it? But fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with giving someone software to use on the basis that they enter into a contract with the sender.
  2. I see no reason to restrict the receiver's use of the message if they do not forward it to someone else. Fundamentally, I can "replay" a movie in my memory, and you can't erase your content from my brain. Based on this, there is no good reason to restrict the receiver once the message is received, because in a very real sense, the message has become part of the receiver's life and they have the right to re-experience it at will. This is the one contract clause I think is unethical without extreme extenuating circumstances (such as classified information).
  3. As a result of my answer to 2, no interaction is possible. Once the sender sends their message, they are blind to what the receiver does with it. It might seem the model I've built is a little biased in favor of this point of view, but I submit that's because reality is biased in favor of this view; we must artificially limit the receiver to create a viable "pay-per-every-view" market.
  4. I'd keep Fair Use as it is now, require that Fair Use be possible and made reasonably easy as the Free Speech considerations override any putative sender's right to prevent Fair Use, and otherwise allow the sender to restrict the receiver in a mutually-agreeable manner subject to normal law.

In light of the analysis I'm about to perform in the main text, and due to the careful definitions I've given many of these terms, there is actually a lot more to these answers then immediately meets the eye. Remember that unlike the rest of the essay which I claim is Truth, I am explicitly labelling this my Opinion.

Having come this far, it may surprise you to learn that I have no intention of answering these questions. I have my opinions, which given this context are brief enough and inconsequential enough to be explained in a sidebar, and I would like to explore the issues in a bit, but I also believe unlike the other two degrees of freedom, there are multiple acceptable answers, even given the choices we've made as a society and the general principles I've laid out in the rest of this essay such as the Symmetry Property.

However, even in the domain of the multiple acceptable answers, not all answers are possible simultaneously. Some choices we make will constrict our freedom to make other choices, and we will either need to decide which is more valuable to us, or work out some way to cleanly delimit the boundaries between the domains where different choices take effect. As I take you through at least a partial analysis of the issues, the most important things to watch for are the fundamental conflicts between different choices made for how the sender can restrict the receiver.

On the one hand it seems rather odd that it took this long to get to this result. On the other hand, I don't think anyone who has been tracking these issues can deny that there's a lot of confusion and fuzzy thinking out there. One could probably spend two or three times more verbiage then I have just clearing away the fuzz, and until the questions are clarified, it's impossible to give good answers to any question. I believe that you can not just jump into this chapter and truly understand what I'm trying to say without the context and terminology provided by the previous chapters.