The ethics of digital media

New at ZDNet: Where do you stand on digital media ethics?

I’m back from vacation, digging through a pile of e-mail and snail mail and more packages than I care to count. Anyway, while I try to find my desk under this mountain of paper, help me wrestle with some ethical questions about the rightness and wrongness of personal actions when it comes to digital media. We can all agree, I think, that it’s easy to make perfect copies of digital media, and that there’s no such thing as an unbreakable copy protection scheme. But the fact that you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Does it?

In that spirit, I’ve posted six questions over at ZDNet. (Like, is it ever OK to buy a CD and burn a copy for a friend? How do you feel about the ethics of ripping copies of DVDs you rent from Netflix?) Help me out by sharing your thoughts in the Talkback section there or in the comments to this post.

I have my own ideas about some of these issues, but I don’t want to prejudice anyone’s answers, so I’ll read comments for a few days before posting a follow-up. OK, have at it.