Law and Ethics - Which Rules?

You may or may not remember from my class presentation that I talked about how society's expectations govern the ethical guidelines under which corporations operate. If you don't remember here's the quote I used:

 “Society is predicated upon behaviour that it expects will advance itself. It is not interested in behaviour that will force the society to regress. Business is established and allowed to exist because in capitalist societies it is deemed to have a central and pivotal role in the betterment of society.”

- Svensson and Wood, 2008

I found that society's expectations do not only affect ethical behavior, but that they also affect the laws under which corporations and the rest of society operate. Why is this? Because the laws under which corporations operate are naturally affected by ethical principles. This idea is so incredibly intriguing, and I'm not going to go into all of the details here because there's so much to write about and not all of it will be relevant to this paper, but I think it's worth bringing up. I actually think I could write an entire research paper about the way the law and ethics are intertwined, but I'll save that for another day. Anyway, I found this wonderful article by Jose Antonio Marina called "Genealogy of Morality and Law" that does a great job simplifying this topic. 

Here's the progression of his argument for why law and ethics are intertwined:

1. Law aims to search for acceptable ways to solve conflict.
2. A conflict may only be considered as solved when protection of some value considered as fundamental for coexistence is achieved.
3. One feature of law is to search for a system of solution to social conflicts that keep society's fundamental values safe.
4. The selection and justification of those fundamental values is not legal but moral.
5. Therefore: The fundamental criteria to legally solve problems is extralegal.

In lamens terms, ethics help to shape laws, but together laws and ethics govern business. How and why is this important to the recording industry?

The recording industry has copyright law to govern its actions as well of the actions of music consumers. The recording industry legally has the right to sue its consumers. But does that mean that it is ethically sound for the recording industry to sue one music pirate but not another to prove a point? Based on the animosity that has been bred between the recording industry (aka business) and its consumers (aka society) it seems like society is against big business suing individual consumers. If ethical principles are governed by society, and a majority of those in society think that it is not ok for the recording industry to sue individual music pirates, then perhaps it is not ethically sound for the recording industry to sue individual music pirates.

But then you must ask: If society governs what is ethically sound, and ethics shape the meaning of laws, should copyright law be abolished? That's not an easy question to answer and I don't intend to answer it here. Copyright law has its own ethical implications and reasoning behind it. It is meant to protect the rights of the creators of each work, but in the growing technological age it may just act as a barrier to innovation. It protects the creative works of society, which is why it was implemented in the first place, but at the same time it's stifling the sharing of music throughout society, which is something that consumers dislike. It is a complicated subject. Perhaps I should continue to look into it.