Abstract

From the viewpoint of Information Ethics. I tried to examine the moral justification of Intellectual Property Rights in the age of the digital information society. Lockian traditional argument of property rights which is based on the value of labor and Hegelian theory of personalization, both are not enough to justify the new Intellectual Property Rights. The notions of Intellectual Property Rights are to be changed. One change is from the absolute dominion over material property to the limited dominion over intellectual property. The change from property rights to process control rights is the other. To protect these intellectual property rights, there are three possible protection devices that we might take - legal protection, technical protection and moral protection. I argued that both legal and technical protection have some limitations, so the final way to protect the IP rights is to attempt to establish the moral protection as a fundamental solution.