The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying

The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying responds to the rapidly changing attitudes towards the use of another's ideas, styles, and artworks. With advances in technology making the copying of artworks and other artefacts exponentially easier, questions of copying no longer focus on the problems of forgery: they now expand into aesthetic and ethical legal concerns. This volume addresses the changes and provides the first philosophical foundation for an aesthetics and ethics of copying.

Scholars from philosophy of art, philosophy of technology, philosophy of law, ethics, legal theory, media studies, art history, literary theory, and sociology discuss the role that copying plays in human culture, confronting the question of how-and why-copying fits into our broader system of values. Teasing out the factors and conceptual distinctions that must be accounted for in an ontology of copying, they set a groundwork for understanding the nature of copies and copying, showing how these interweave with ethical and legal concepts. Covering unique concerns for copying in the domain of artworks, from music and art to plays and literature, contributors look at work by artists including Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Rauschenberg, Courbet and Manet and conclude with the normative dimensions of copying in the twenty-first century.

By bringing this topic into the philosophical domain and highlighting its philosophical relevance, The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying establishes the complex conditions-ontological, aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and legal-that underlie and complicate the topic. The result is a timely collection that establishes the need for further discussion.

Darren Hudson Hick is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University, USA. He is the author of numerous articles on issues in copyright and the ontology of art and Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (2012).

Reinold Schmücker is a Professor of Philosophy at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster, Germany. He is the author of Was ist Kunst? Eine Grundlegung [What Is Art? A Foundation] (1998; Revised Edition, 2014) and editor of several German language collected volumes on aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

Introduction

Part I.The Copying Animal: Exploring the Cultural Value of Copying
1) Copying, Culture, and Values, Mark Alfino
2) Imitation and Replication of Technical Artifacts: Where is the Wrong in Copying?, Wybo Houkes
3) Copying and the Limits of Substitutability, Dieter Birnbacher

Part II. What Is a Copy? Conceptual Perspectives
4) What is an Artifact Copy? A Quadrinomial Definition, Amrei Bahr
5) Copies, Replicas, and Fakes: Some Conceptual Distinctions, Massimiliano Carrara
6) What is the Object in Which Copyright Can Subsist?, Maria Elisabeth Reicher
7) 'Copy' and 'Reproduction' in Copyright and Droit d'Auteur Legislation,Thomas Dreier
8) Self Copying and Copyright, Lionel Bently

Part III: The Copying Artist: Aesthetics and the Challenges of Copying
9) The Nature of Copying and the Singular Literary Work, Darren Hudson Hick
10) Illegitimate Legitimate Copies: A Grey Area in Dealing with Literary Works, Annette Gilbert
11) When is the Appropriation of Existing Artworks Wrong?, Lisa Jones
12) A Paradox of Style in Modern Art, Jan Bäcklund
13) Plagiarizing Nonfiction: Legal Cases, Aesthetic Questions, and the Rules of Copying, David Oels

Part IV: Freedom for All? Towards an Ethics of Copying for the Digital Age
14) Why We Are in Need of an Ethics of Copying, Reinold Schmücker
15) Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying: An Outline, Eberhard Ortland
16) Ethical Approaches for Copying Digital Artifacts: Who's 'Copying' (What)?, Charles Ess
17) A Sociological Perspective on the Ethics of Copying, Pavel Zahrádka
18) Ethics, Evolved: An International Perspective on Copying in the Networked Age, Aram Sinnreich

Coda
19) Last Night an Edit Saved My Life, Hans Nieswandt

Index

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