Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Judaism and IP law

Author:Seth Gordon
Posted:8/29/2000; 1:23:14 PM
Topic:Judaism, Fiddler on the Roof, and Humanity
Msg #:20510 (In response to 20507)
Prev/Next:20509 / 20511

The Talmudic text was pretty much canonified by the fifth century, a thousand years before Gutenberg.

There's a pretty big concern in the Jewish tradition with proper attribution. A line in Pirke Avot, a second-century collection of ethical homilies, says (quoting from memory) that someone who quotes someone else's teaching and attributes the source "brings salvation to the world". A lot of disputes in the Talmud are over which early rabbi gave a particular legal opinion. One medieval rabbinic leader (I think this was Rabbeinu Gershom, c. 10th century) issued an edict forbidding scribes from inserting their own texts while copying the Talmud. (A lot of the Talmudic discussions are hard to follow, and some scribes tried to help the reader by adding explanations; unfortunately, these were added to the text itself, not to the margins, so you couldn't tell where the original text left off and the explanations began, and then sometimes the explanations were wrong.)

There's also a principle called geneivat da'at (literally, "theft of mind"). The classical example of geneivat da'at is asking a shopkeeper about items in a store without having any intention to buy them: you're deceiving the shopkeeper by making him/her think that you're a potential customer, and the rabbis considered this unethical.

And of course, there's the general principle that Jews have to follow the civil law of the country they live in (except when the civil law says things like "you must bow down to this statue of Zeus"). I suspect that if you ask an Orthodox rabbi why you have to observe copyrights, he would point to this principle.

I'm not sure what (if anything) Jewish communities did to regulate IP between the early days of printing (when, by the way, printing was a Church-controlled monopoly) and the modern regime of copyright law (which developed around the same time that Jewish communities in Europe were losing the legal power to regulate their own members).



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