Fair use is a legal doctrine that authorizes the unlimited use of copyright-protected works in certain instances. These circumstances include criticism/parody, commenting, news reporting, text and data mining, teaching/educational purposes, and research. There are four factors that are considered when evaluating fair use: the purpose and character of your use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use upon the potential market (Stim). Some limitations that have been placed on fair use are personal use exemption, which says that a limited number of copies can be made for personal use, Digital Millennium Copyright Act raised penalties for internet intellectual property infringement, and PIPA and SOPA require Internet Service Providers to ban access to infringing websites and criminalizes streaming of online content. Since the creation of YouTube, the concept of fair use has become a highly debated issue due to the explosion of user-generated content and ability to post whatever content you so choose. YouTube experienced issues of music and videos of artists being posted without their explicit permission. They are combatting this problem by having the content owner contemplate fair use before they send a copyright takedown notice and YouTube removes the video (What is Fair Use?). This allows for some protection of original works.
Artists have some rights in terms of maintaining exclusive rights of their creations by giving explicit permission. The whole premise behind copyrighting your material is that you have ownership of said material and can control how it gets distributed and who gets to use it. The most common justification is of moral rights. The law must recognize the rights of creators in order to encourage the creation of content (University of Minnesota Libraries). Economic rights include the right of artists to make copies and distribute them how they see fit, publicly perform or display the creation, and create derivative works, which means they can create further iterations of the original content with changes (Copyright Basics). Artists also have moral rights to maintain control and ownership of their own original content to prevent uses of which they don’t approve.
A work is transformative if, “it adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning or message” (Office of General Counsel). The potential benefits from transformative reuse include the opportunity to add new expression or meaning to a piece of work, creating a parody to ridicule, quotations to be used in criticism, and reproduction used by a teacher to illustrate a concept or lesson. Transformative reuse allows creativity and others to express their thoughts or respond to the creators. Some of the values of the public interest are education, access to information, and development. By not allowing transformative reuse it essentially prevents access to the thoughts and creations of others, or promoting education for all. Also, by not allowing transformative reuse it limits freedom of expression of citizens.
2. Endangered animals and animal parts are part of a large illegal trade. Some of the illegally traded goods are elephant tusks, rhino horns, and tiger skins. The poaching of these animals for specific parts leads to the extinction of these animals. This is because these animals and/or parts are considered common resources, which are both rival and non-excludable. This means that consumption by one person reduces the amount available for others and people cannot be prevented from consuming even if they don’t pay for the good. Because these animal and/or animal parts are common resources, overuse and extinction are normal. Some other factors that lead to the overuse and extinction of endangered/valuable species are high commercial values of rhino tusks or elephant tusks, an incapability to be domesticated, and threats to the natural environment, and the rate of natural increase is slow. One such example is the African elephant because they are particularly vulnerable due to their ability to be domesticated, their extensive range so they are hard to retain and there is an absence of strong government to control poaching.
Two ways to limit the poaching and extinction of valuable animals like rhinos and elephants are to establish private ownership and husbandry practices. Animals that could have been a common resource would instead be considered purely private goods. Purely private goods are rival and excludable. By allowing the private ownership of these animals, the property owners can domesticate these animals, protect them, or kill them off in select quantities on their own property. The establishment of husbandry practices and property rights gives individuals an incentive to preserve these animals. It also allows the government to regulate behavior, curb abuses of these animals, and raise tax revenues.
Property rights are very difficult and expensive to enforce over endangered species. This is due to the high value of their parts to thieves. According to the Allen paper, the cost of private ownership of these animals can far exceed an animal’s value (Allen). An alternative Allen discusses is making the animal worthless to poachers by cutting off the horns of rhinos to sell or dyeing the horn of the rhinos yellow (Allen). This allows the life of the animal to be preserved but removing the part that poachers so seek. It thereby reduces the value of the rhino so poaching is reduced and protection of the endangered animal is cheaper.
3. Human trafficking and the sex trade is both a national and global problem. There is an estimated 244,000-325,000 children at risk for sex trafficking in the United States currently. There are also approximately 208,000 children not living at home who have run away and are considered especially at risk for trafficking. The average starting age for sex trafficking victims is thirteen; however, 12% were under the age of twelve. Another startling fact is individuals who are abused are at least twice as likely to be involved in trafficking and many of them are addicted to drugs. All of these factors contribute to the massive social costs, one part of the economic analysis, of sex trafficking.
As in all markets there are suppliers and demanders. The demand comes from those persons who wish to pay to have sexual relations with the victims. In the act of sex trafficking, the suppliers are the pimps who traffic the women and then the victims perform the sexual act. The pimps use manipulation, abuse, force, and coercion to sexually exploit their victims. The level of abuse is very high and this process is contingent upon it. The major social cost associated with the sex trade is the abuse and coercion between the pimps and the victims because it nulls the idea that this is a voluntary exchange in a marketplace. Also, it is important to note that most sex trafficking victims began when they were underage. This is significant because legally they cannot consent to the sexual acts they are being forced to do. This further demonstrates that is not a voluntary exchange. For those victims above the legal age of consent, they are constantly manipulated and abused, so they have no option to escape. The most common practice is for the pimps to take away their legal documents. All of these are considered social costs within the sex trade.
Some other social costs involved in the sex trade include: abuse, high level of drug addiction, unmatched consent, and poverty of the victims. All of these coupled together make for an imperfect market that is not in fact free. It is very hard to measure the external costs of human sex trafficking because dehumanizes the lives of the sex trafficking victims. Sure, the demanders/customers pay a price for the girls they are engaging in sexual acts with, but that is only the marginal cost. These hardly measurable social costs represent the hardships the victims endure in this trade while the pimps are profiting, glorified, and powerful.
4. The United States has a flawed system for organ donation and organ sales. The two ways to donate organs as of today are living and deceased. Living donations, such as kidney donations, can occur three different ways: directed, non-directed, and paired (UNOS, 2017). The other alternative, deceased donations, need a pre-registered donor upon death to have viable organs. Then the deceased person’s organs can be donated to someone on the waitlist (UNOS, 2017). More people demand organs currently and the voluntary/optional system does not have the needed supply to meet this demand. Therefore, an illegal market appears due to the unfulfilled demand and Americans quickly turn to illegal organ sales to obtain necessary organs that otherwise, they would have to wait multiple years for on the current waitlist system.
A well-regulated market for organ sales has many advantages. These include: a decrease in the number of people waiting for a transplant, economic benefits from revenue, and increased safety for both donors and patients. A decrease in the number of people on the waitlist reduces overall demand. Patients desperately in need of organ donations will receive the organs in a timelier manner. Economic benefits occur because regulations will set prices on organs and prevent inflated costs, and revenue to the donors can create additional opportunities as well. Lastly, regulation will increase safety for both donors and patients. In the underground organ market, surgeries are often done in unsafe conditions outside of hospitals, using improper equipment, and putting patients and donors at risk. Therefore, by creating a legal organ trade it eliminates the need for illegal, dangerous, and back-door style surgeries.
There are some disadvantages to a well-regulated organ sales market, such as unfairly benefitting the wealthy, ethical dilemmas, and organ quality concerns. This system will clearly benefit the wealthy members of society who are willing to pay whatever the cost to skip the line. Essentially, they would pay an organ donor more to donate to them, which push the poor out of the market because they can’t pay as much. The legalization of organ sales could also lead to some potentially ethical dilemmas, like placing value on a human life. Finally, quality concerns exist on both ends of the system. Patients would not be incentivized to change bad lifestyle habits because of the accessibility and availability of replacement organs. Also, donors could be poor and in need of money so they could offer to donate their organs, which may not be of “donatable quality”.