Help! Ethical Dilemma!

[jim stone]

I lived three years in India. I travelled through Afghanistan
and Pakistan. You'all are looking at things from an understandable
vantage point of disliking commercialism and lousy flutes,
but I remember people's faces and human bodies close
to skeletons. There is chronic hunger in these countries.

They have to start somewhere. Best to help them
make better flutes. There is more at stake here
than internal tuning.

[Feadoggie]

I would not sell the plans to them. I think you are well within your rights to limit the distribution of your plans to parties that will not cause harm to your commercial enterprise by flooding the market with cheap flutes, etc.

If they are a commercial maker, they should have the resources to either commision plans be drawn from existing flutes or purchase such a flute and take the measurements themselves. Or they could do the research and engineering to develop their own design.

No commercial enterprise would be looked at poorly by not giving leg up to another competitor in their same market.

If you do provide the plans and they are a mass producer, make sure that you receive a royalty on every flute made, say $110AUD.

Feadoggie

[johnkerr]

Sell the Pakistanis the plans, but also be sure to apply the hard-sell so that they feel they must pay extra to avail of the associated multi-year "service contract". Ship the plans to them on such digital media that they are guaranteed to run into problems in trying to access and interpret the plans. (Any Microsoft product should do for this purpose.) This will ensure that the Pakistanis will need to call the help line in order to make any use of the plans. You will also of course have outsourced your help line operations to India. (This is all the rage now here in the US, but I'm not sure if the trend has reached Australia yet. Perhaps you could become a pioneer for Australian business in this regard.) Remember of course the ancient enmity between Pakistan and India. Any guilt you would endure for having sparked yet another conflict between these long-time foes will far and away outstrip the guilt you would feel if inferior Pakistani Pratten flutes made it onto the market as a result of your actions. You could then rest easy knowing that your name would not go down in flute history with a black mark beside it.

[Aanvil]

Sell to all or sell to none?

Nonsense.

Terry, you are under no obligation to "help" Pakistan.

They can find access to a Pratten's and copy it if they cared to.

This "do gooder" attitude around here just chaps my hide.

Western first world guilt if I ever saw it.

There is no karma attached to this.

These people would have not one single problem about taking the food from you and your families mouths given the chance.

This is a business. You may wish to work with them though but you consultation should come at a price worthy of your experience.

I'll also mention there is no way to truly legally bind these people into anything.

As already pointed you might sell those plans to me or any other interested in a homespun business and I could make no more than handful in a year. Thats with maximum effort.

These guys will go out and make a thousand of them... with sweatshop labor.

If you want to be responsible for putting more people to work do it in Oz.

Charity starts at home.

[Ronbo]

Damn good post, Aanvil.

[Cubitt]

Terry, from my reading of the responses (all good - every one), I think the conclusion you can reach is that this is not an ethical question at all.

Simply do what you want to do. You require no justification either way.

[Nanohedron]

Sell to all or sell to none.

Second that. Pakistani-made flutes won't become better if you don't sell the plans, but they might if you do. And I don't think that the availability of a set of well-made plans will cause them to overflow the world market, to be honest.

I think as long as they do not sell their flutes as Terry McGee flutes there's nothing wrong with selling them the plans. They cannot ruin the Pratten name since it's more of a category now, but they could ruin your name.

I'm siding with this camp. Guardedly. Aanvil, Doug T. and Jack B. have points, too, though.

I've always said that if Pakistani makers would bother to come out with good flutes for a change, I'd happily applaud them. As I see it, here's a chance. Truth be told, though, the reputational damage they've caused themselves is so great already that it might take a while for it to be healed. At least let those who don't know, or can't afford better, have a chance for acceptable instruments.

I'm going to really stick my neck out here and suggest that it seems there may already be change afoot in Sialkot City: at a music shop, I recently had a chance to try two Pakistani instruments, one a five-key, and the other keyless. The former was business as usual: useless. The latter, though, was actually good, to my very great surprise; it not only played in tune, strongly, and well, it looked good, too. I was told by the proprietor that another player, a seasoned professional at traditional music, concurred. I've left a message with the fluteplayer to see if this is true.

I've inquired after the specific maker of the good instrument (after all, why gamble?) but at this time there's not much info here. I suppose I'd have to contact the home office in Britain for that.

So, you just never know. Maybe the good flute was just an accident - and maybe not. It wouldn't take the place of a superior, well-crafted flute from an individual maker, but, hey.

[Guinness]

It ain't nuclear technology so I don't see a problem.

[Doug_Tipple]

One possible direction that this discussion can turn is toward a discussion of flute economics that Casey Burns brought up on this forum recently. It is a hard to always know whether having low-cost products, such as inexpensive high-quality flutes, is better than having local artisans employed in making the same items, albeit having the items available at a higher price. It all depends on your point of view, I suppose. Casey's thread has gone away from the flute forum, but the anxiety of looking forward to an era of low cost products at the expense of local jobs in the developed countries is an ongoing reality. I can see the future where there are many low-cost products but no money to buy them. It isn't a satisfying vision. It isn't that we want to deny others the opportunity to work and better their own lives, but we do want to hold on, if we can, to what little productive capacity we now have. Being a little possessive about trade secrets seems like one way of doing this.

[Nanohedron]

One possible direction that this discussion can turn is toward a discussion of flute economics that Casey Burns brought up on this forum recently. It is a hard to always know whether having low-cost products, such as inexpensive high-quality flutes, is better than having local artisans employed in making the same items, albeit having the items available at a higher price. It all depends on your point of view, I suppose. Casey's thread has gone away from the flute forum, but the anxiety of looking forward to an era of low cost products at the expense of local jobs in the developed countries is an ongoing reality. I can see the future where there are many low-cost products but no money to buy them. It isn't a satisfying vision. It isn't that we want to deny others the opportunity to work and better their own lives, but we do want to hold on, if we can, to what little productive capacity we now have. Being a little possessive about trade secrets seems like one way of doing this.

Yeah, that's the one problem I have with the idea: how it would affect the better, hands-on, craftsmanly makers.

[jim stone]

Sell to all or sell to none?

Nonsense.

Terry, you are under no obligation to "help" Pakistan.

They can find access to a Pratten's and copy it if they cared to.

This "do gooder" attitude around here just chaps my hide.

Western first world guilt if I ever saw it.

There is no karma attached to this.

These people would have not one single problem about taking the food from you and your families mouths given the chance.

This is a business. You may wish to work with them though but you consultation should come at a price worthy of your experience.

I'll also mention there is no way to truly legally bind these people into anything.

As already pointed you might sell those plans to me or any other interested in a homespun business and I could make no more than handful in a year. Thats with maximum effort.

These guys will go out and make a thousand of them... with sweatshop labor.

If you want to be responsible for putting more people to work do it in Oz.

Charity starts at home.

Straw man. Nobody is saying Terry has an obligation
to sell his plans to Pakistan. He doesn't have one.
He wants to know what the best thing is to do.
So he's considering costs and benefits to all concerned,
and I'm suggesting the potential benefits outweigh
the risks.

You know I've never considered myself a do gooder.
I'm a conservative Republican, opposed to most things
'do gooders' are supposed to want. I don't think I feel
anything much in the way of guilt. My feelings are
based on living in these countries (which most western
do gooders haven't done), and knowing the people.

But call me what you want, you can't very well refute what I
say by calling me a 'do gooder.' Suppose I'm a guilt-ridden
westerner, etc. What I've said could still be true.

My argument is this:

Look at what Japan did with guitars; look at what China is
doing with mandolins. And look at other things that third
worlders have appropriated from us, first making abysmal
imitations and then improving them until they were making
something pretty good.

Pakistan is probably trying to do that with flutes. This is part of a process
by which Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, China have considerably
lifted themselves out of poverty. It includes lots of thing
other than musical instruments, of course, but they
are part of it. Yamaha guitars, for instance.

Poverty is bad--if you don't agree, no need to read further--
and so doing something that helps along the process of relieving it
is to that extent anyway, good.

I figure Terry thinks poverty is bad--not that we have an obligation
or a responsibility to allieviate it, but that alleviating poverty,
giving very poor people jobs, is a benefit to be counted in
doing the cost/benefit analysis of selling his plans.

Right, they may well use sweatshop labor on their way up,
and that's obnoxious. But this needs to be considered too.
Poor countries have generally risen out of poverty on
the basis of sweatshop labor. It happened in the USA,
it's happened in Japan and Korea and Hong Kong and
wherever there's been rapid economic growth.
The profits go into improving the product and expanding
the ability to produce. The workers in the sweatshops
are, in fact, getting paid more and often working less hard
than they would otherwise--unless, of course, they
would simply be unemployed and starving.
It's too bad, but it has the benefit of giving people
desperately needed jobs and also helping a large
number of people, sometimes an entire society,
out of poverty.

So the point is Why not sell them the plans?

These flutes are bad, not because they are made by
sleazy slimey fat cats but because they are made
by poor people who are trying to break into
the flute market. Helping them make better flutes,
just as other third world producers of musical
instruments have improved their product,
hastens the day when people won't get
burned by buying these instruments.

If better flutes sell better there will be an impetus
to continue to improve the instruments...
as has happened elsewhere.

It isn't going to compete with Terry's business,
cause these folks aren't going to be producing
instruments of that quality for some time,
if ever.

And it may employ a good number of very poor people.
It may help an emerging economy.

There are potential benefits and potential costs.
Terry wants to know, I think, which are greater.
When you put this business in its economic
context, namely, an emerging third world
flute industry, there seem to be some
pretty obvious benefits to helping
them along.

Certainly I don't see the potential costs and risks as being so great
as to give one a strong reason to refuse to sell
the plans to these folks, to make an exception of them,
while one sells them to everyone else.

Once again I agree that Terry has no obligations here,
but that isn't the point. The question is what are the
actual effects likely to be? On all affected. If you don't
know what to do, you might
as well do what will probably do the most good.

You write: 'These people would have not one single problem about taking the food from you and your families mouths given the chance.'

I think you're being hard on people I suppose you never met. I don't know
why you say this. You know there are probably a good number
of poor folks employed in this business, more coming if it prospers.
I've met a lot of such people in Asia--they are a good deal more likely to give you the shirt off their back than you might guess, certainly
more so than anybody I've met in the first world.

[Aanvil]

You know Jim,

You are not the only one in this thread.

I wasn't specifically directing anything at you.

Just the mindset in general.


Talk about a straw man.

Yours is on fire.

Besides you make many more assumption about me than you need to... really now. I think poverty is bad too.


You are a philosopher.

That is quite clear.


Terry is in the business of selling flutes.

I stand by my comments.

I do not feel this is a good idea to sell these folks his plans.


Peace.

[Jayhawk]

Terry - do you have good reason to assume this person is associated with one of these companies in Pakistan that mass produces those poor quality flutes? Several thoughts have come to mind:

1) Could this person be a former employee, perhaps one who actually made the flutes, and he/she simply feels they have the skills to make a good flute at a reasonable price since cost of living is lower in Pakistan? Individual initiative is not a western only concept these days (nor was it ever a western only concept).

2) Alternately, this could be a break off group from one of those companies - perhaps one that wants to actually produce a good quality flute. Just because they have the plans does not ensure they will make a good quality instrument - only time would tell. They could still use substandard wood or not season is properly, drill the holes correctly, or produce a good quality bore.

I think we're showing some bias here - whether we realize it or not. If some individual unknown to Terry contacted him about his plans and he/she were not from Pakistan or India (where we know quite a few poorly made flutes come from), would we even be talking here? Couldn't someone buying the plans from North America or Europe be a covert agent for Patrick Olwell, Peter Noy, or Casey Burns (sneaky folks all )?

No matter what Terry decides to do (it is his choice), it seems prudent to make sure that any buyers of the plans do not represent themselves or the finished product as being produced or supported by Terry.

Eric

[Bridges-PdP]

Taking score

Assumptions...

Terry has no obligation to save the third world.
Terry has every right to protect his own intellectual property.
Poverty is bad.

Bad...

Terry (and others) could lose business, if/when, these 'Pakistani' flute makers begin to make a product whose quality rivals their own.

These 'Pakistani' flute makers might use Terry's good name in connection with a poor product.

Good...

Potentially, many jobs are created in an area where they are desparately needed.

Potentially, improved quality low cost flutes are produced.


Does this sum up most of what's been said?

[Guinness]

...I have been asked by someone in Pakistan...

Quite a lot of hot air, assumption, and extrapolation thusfar given that this is all we really know.