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morbius

Author Author a redundant episode/Story?

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If I remember correctly Author Author was that episode about the doc fighting for his right to control his work because the Bolian publisher refused to recognise him as a fully sentient person. As well all know Janeway and Tuvok mount a legal challenge and sort of win. But in light of that fact that 13 years earlier Picard had sucesfully demonstrated that Data was a fully sentient life form, could not Janeway and Tuvok have simply referred the arbiter to case involving Data as legal precedent? I mean both Data and the Doc were sentient artificial life forms, therefore the doc should be entitled to the same rights that were granted to Data. This is why I think the whole episode was a bit redundant. Anyone else agree?

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I liked the ep too, but still given that TNG had explored a similar issue involving data didn't you find this ep a tad bit repetitive?

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Data was an Android. The Doctor was a hologram. The same hologram that was aboard many other ships, including the Enterprise-E. I think a whole new arguement was needed to prove that the Doctor was a lifeform. The case with Data was very different.

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Actually I don't consider Data to be a life form, but one of the attributes of life forms in a biological sense is the ability to reproduce. Data could reproduce in a limited way (Lal) but the doctor clearly did not have this ability, or at least didn't exercise it.

 

Where the biological definition falls apart, however, is how to classify a species where there is a last survivor with no opposite sex available. Clearly the being isn't dead (yet) but at the same time it can't reproduce.

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Data was an Android. The Doctor was a hologram. The same hologram that was aboard many other ships, including the Enterprise-E. I think a whole new arguement was needed to prove that the Doctor was a lifeform. The case with Data was very different.

 

I agree Data at the time was one of a kind which made him unique. The EMH Mark 1 on the other hand was created in a mass quantity to serve a specific purpose. The Doctor is unique in his own way considering his expanded programing and that he is most likely the only mark one still serving in a medical capacity, but that doesn't make up for the fact that there are still many EMH Mark One's still in use.

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Data was an Android. The Doctor was a hologram. The same hologram that was aboard many other ships, including the Enterprise-E. I think a whole new arguement was needed to prove that the Doctor was a lifeform. The case with Data was very different.

 

Data may have been an Android and the Doc a Hologram, but in a broad sense both of them were artifcial life forms. Just as Species 8472 and Humanity are radically different, but still fall into the same category of biological life forms.

 

You rightly point out that the doc and his fellow holograms were mass produced for the sole purpose of serving the needs of others and that purprose alone. But .iIn the Voyager ep, the main focus was prooving the Doc was a person, it was not about weather holograms were entitled to rights. They focused on prooving how the Doc had the capability to have friendships and to think for himself. Because of the Doc's uniqueness as being the only sentient hologram in starfleet, this line of argument would not have been enough to convince someone that all the other EMH Mark 1's were entitled to the same rights. Perhaps what had helped Data win his case was the fact that he was unique. At the end of the episode the Judge ruled that Data had the freedom to choose. Note it was not that Androids in general had the freedom to chose, but Data specifically, which makes sense coz a person could deliberately manufacture a non sentient android if they wanted to, but creating a sentient android is an entirely different ball game.

 

Both Data and Doc had one thing in common. They were both unique artificial life forms. So even if the Federation does not consider Androids and Holograms as entire groupings to be entitled rights, Data and the Doc as individulas are still both entitled to their rights, under the catergory of individualy evolved sentient artificial life forms. Therefore the situation of Data and Doc isnt so different in my opinion.

Edited by morbius

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I think the 2 episodes touched on a lot of the same issues but were also different. Both episodes dealt with the rights of artificial life forms but each dealt with different aspects of Federation law and Starfleet regulations.

 

In TNG Data was a Starfleet officer and it was being argued that since he was an android that he was Starfleet property and subject to anything that Starfleet desired to do with him and that while a human (or other living race) could simply resign his or her commission to avoid unsavory experiments it was argued that as "property" Data had no right to resign and was required to do whatever he was told to do.

 

In Voyager the Doctor was dealing with a civilian company that had nothing to do with Starfleet, this episode really started out being about intellectual property rights and moved into holo-rights.

 

I think the main difference between the 2 is that in TNG it was basically about whether or not Starfleet "owned" Data or if he was he a "free man".

 

Voyager was about whether or not the Doctor owned the rights to his own intellectual creations.

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I think the 2 episodes touched on a lot of the same issues but were also different. Both episodes dealt with the rights of artificial life forms but each dealt with different aspects of Federation law and Starfleet regulations.

 

In TNG Data was a Starfleet officer and it was being argued that since he was an android that he was Starfleet property and subject to anything that Starfleet desired to do with him and that while a human (or other living race) could simply resign his or her commission to avoid unsavory experiments it was argued that as "property" Data had no right to resign and was required to do whatever he was told to do.

 

In Voyager the Doctor was dealing with a civilian company that had nothing to do with Starfleet, this episode really started out being about intellectual property rights and moved into holo-rights.

 

I think the main difference between the 2 is that in TNG it was basically about whether or not Starfleet "owned" Data or if he was he a "free man".

 

Voyager was about whether or not the Doctor owned the rights to his own intellectual creations.

 

 

Yes its true that in TNG the issue was if Data was property and in VOY it was if the Doc had control over his work. But my point is that in both cases you have to proove that they are entitiled rights as sentient beings in order to make the case that Data wasnt property and that the Doc could control his work. Its like saying that if a court has two cases, one dealing with hate speach and the other dealing with censorship. Both of these cases would be approached by referring to the 1st amendment and freedom of expression. I think its the same case here, while there may be contextual differences between the two cases, you would still have to refer to the same legislation and law dealing with the rights of sentient articifial life forms to prove the Docs and Datas case. Which is why I think that if Janeway made referrence to Data case the arbitration would have ended a lot sooner.

 

this brings up the question as to the docs rights? is he the property of starfleet?

 

 

Nope he's the property of Rick Berman :welcome:

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