Computer Ethics assignment

Tavani, chap 8 “Copy Wrong”, New Yorker Article Menand

IP Introduction

1.  

a. Copyright maximalists à give publishers rights over every temporary reproduction in computer memory (such as copies made when browsing the Internet) and every transmission of copyrighted works in digital format

1. Would have eliminated fair use rights (private use of copyrighted material for personal use)

2. Would have pushed much of the cost of policing copyright infringement onto ISPs.

b. Copyright Minimalistsà libertarian approach.  Information wants to be free and that it is futile to try to preserve intellectual property protection in this digital era.

1. John Barlow argues that ownership of information in an open environment is anti-democratic because it interferes with free circulation of ideas.

c. Can we have a middle position?  Problems and Questions:

1. What is fair use:  In cyberspace what is a “copy” and who is the public?

2. What is the role of Digital Rights Management? (DRM)

3. What is the scope of copyright protection over digital products esp those on the Internet?Do organizations have property rights in domain names?  What is the scope of these rights?

4. Should it include a new form of property right for the content of data bases.  If a data base costs a lot to create, should a company be able to copyright it to prevent it from being downloaded and sold?

5. Should ISP’s be responsible for copyright infringement among its users?

1.   How do we control and restrict the use of metattags in Web sites?

6. Does linking to another web site ever infringe on intellectual property rights.

7. Do copyright and trademark owners have the prerogative to restrict the use of their work on the Internet?

Property Defininition

 Let’s define property.

a.       Property is the cornerstone of most legal systems, yet it is quite complex and hard to define simply.

1.Ownership=property.  Therefore the owner has certain rights and liabilities with respect to his/her property—to use, manage, possess, exclude, transfer, and derive income.  Known as the “Blackstone Bundle” after Will Blackstone’s commentaries.

b.   Intellectual Property:  consists of non-tangible intellectual objects such as original musical compositions, poems, novels, inventions, product formulae, etc.

1.         Non-exclusive—can be used by many simultaneously.

2.      While it may be time consuming and costly to produce, providing additional access is minimal.

3.      Problems: to many, assigning property rights to intellectual objects goes against First Amendment and the goals of a free society because this implies that someone has the right to certain concepts, knowledge or information.  That is, if you have property rights to an idea, you would have the right to exclude others from using or building on it.

4.      Others believe, esp in Europe that  these works express the creativity and personality of the creators, who should have the right to say how they should be used.= personality theory of intellectual property.  After Hegel and "les droits morals".  "Artists should be given protection for their artistic work, even if the;y have no legal claim to any monetary award associated with it". (Tavani, p.248)  Nike and John Lennon .  Scenario 8-6.

Legal Protection for Intellectual Property

 II.             Legal protection for intellectual property:  copy right, patent, trademark, trade secret ( Bottle of coke)  bottle shape; liquid; slogan; patent; trade secret; copyright. 

1.

a. Question:   Where does software fit?

b. Trademark :  word, phrase or symbol that id’s a product. 243

1.

1. Has to be distinctive- arbitrary or fanciful and descriptive

2. Register of first use it publicly

3. Violated—infringed upon.  Apple paid the Beatles $30 million because Apple was their record label therefore couldn’t be used in the music business.  When Mac’s started to play music they infringed.

4. Tm  is the trademark sign.

c. Patent —awarded for 20 years. P. 242

1.

1. Original, useful, non obvious inventions, processes, formula, machines – public document that provides a detailed description of the product. 

2. Objective to foster invention of useful arts and sciences

3. No ownership for mental processes---therefore prolonged debate over whether s/w and the algorithms they incoporate should be eligible.Emergence of innovative commercial enterprises on the web has triggered some novel patent controversies. E.g. priceline.com was awarded a patent for its e-based business that sells airline tickets and awards FF miles on Internet purchases.  Controversial—because it applies to such general business models and may end up precluding competition.  May lead to an overflow of vendors seeking patents and attention could be diverted from creating new cyberspace products to worrying about inadvertently infringing on a patent.

i. 1972 Supreme Court Gottschalk vs Benson said algorithms were unpatentable

ii. 1981 Diamond vs Diehr—reversed somewhat --the process for curing rubber is appropriate for a patent even though it used a s/w and mathematical algorithms.  Therefore the idea per se is not patentable, but the use of a novel idea in a physical process. P.242 bot

d.  Trade secret - protects all aspects of s/w if you can show novelty, economic investment, development effort and attempt to keep it secret.  Laws vary according to regions. P.243

1. S/w seems to fit--  license and non-disclosures clauses to keep it secret.

2. Tech devices and copy protection to protect programs

3. But---problem---when you buy a program and use it, you see the idea of the program and what it does, so you could reverse engineer it.

4. once the secret is out, company has lost any protection against others benefiting from knowledge.

5. may be good for AI programs that are produced for a single user—could license and identify violators.

6. E.g. formula for coca cola – stored in a bank vault in Atlanta.  Task of making the syrup divided among different groups who only know their parts of the formula

7. Trade secrets do not expire.

e.  Copyright :  easy to obtain and cheap p. 235

1. Copyright Act of 1976 still did not include software programs

2. Rights of owners: Copyright owners have the right to authorize others to exercise these rights.  May license a club to perform a play; a radio station that plays a piece may have to pay the songwriter and composer through a performance rights organization such as ASCAP, BMI or SESAC

a. to reproduce the work

b. to distribute copies of the work

c. to display copies of the work in public

d. to perform work in public

e. to produce new works derived from the copyrighted work

Extended in 1998—Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act  extended copyright fro life of author + 50 years to life of author + 70 years.Works produced before 1978 were extended form 75-95 years.Keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain.Scen 8-1 p. 237

a.  .E.g. Happy Birthday to Youalmost never played in public. Why? Because the rights are owned by the Clayton Summy Company who copyrighted the song in 1935.That company collects about 2 million dollars in royalties a year for public performances of Happy Birthday to you.Under CTEA, the song will remain copyrighted until 2030.  There was recently a new ruling on this song. 

b.     for corporate authors e.g. Paramount Pictures works published before 1978 were 75 years  (protection).So if it were published in 1923, it would enter the public domain in 1998…now it will enter it in 2018

c. c.public domain losing out in favor of more substantial protection for authors and big corporations

2. DMCA - impact on fair use, on suppression of innovation and overreach ( we will get back to this)

3. Other IP laws . Tablep. 245

What is Fair Use ?  Def p. 236 mid  needed in education

1.

1. it is legal to reproduce some works without the consent of the copyright holder  for the purposes of teaching,research, news reporting, scholarship etc. Looks at how it affects the commercial market.What  is First Sale ?  Once original work sold the first time, the original owner loses rights over the previously protected work.

i. In 1975 the supreme court ruled that videotaping tv broadcasts for private viewing at a later time is fair use.  Called time shifting.

ii. Space shifting = creating a copy for backup or for use in a portable device is legal.  Making a copy for a friend is not considered fair use.

2. DMCA  threatens fair use with its anticircumvention clause and no reverse engineering

i. Also illegal to make copies of any digitally recorded work for any purpose.

ii. Also illegal to sell or discuss online a sw program designed to circumvent security controls  p.  237 scen 8-2

iii. Extends copyright protection to music broadcast over the internet.  E.g. a college internet radio station would pay an annual fee per listener per song for every song played.  Hard to keep track of that.

iv. There was  a ruling against Eric Corley whose website 2600 Magazine posted the code to break the security of DVD (technological safeguards) DeCSS

v. The US copyright office endorsed a new federal law making it illegal to break tech safeguards for digital forms of books, music and movies:  effective now

vi. Part of the 1998 digital Millenium copyright Act

vii. Under the act, it is illegal to distribute a device lie a computer program that can crack copyright protection security code on an electronic book, dvd music disk

viii. Federal judge said that Corley violated the law by distributing a program designed to break the security code on dvd’s so they could be played on computers running Linux.

ix. DeCSS appeared on the web in other formats

x. When the judge issued the ruling, the copyright office had not yet reviewed the law.  Congress had asked the office to see if there should be exemptions and what should be done about fair use.

xi. After 2 years, the office said that exemptions should not be granted.  This ruling will be in effect for 3 years to study the impact of the ruling

xii. Under the law, civil damages for gaining access to copyrighted material $220-2500—criminal penalties $1 million or 10 years in jail for repeated offenses.

xiii. See wikopedia history of DeCSS for more information.

1. P2P networks:

i. Accessing files on other network nodes

ii. Sharing music

iii. RIAA lawsuits against companies that facilitate it

i. Napster –central server –court killed the company in 2001 by asking it to block all transfers of copyrighted material.

ii. 2nd generation = companies like fast track which was completely distributed.

iii. Bit Torrent – divides a file into pieces and you can download these pieces from >1 node simultaneously reducing the time it takes.  As soon as a node has a piece of a file, it can share it with others.  Downloading speeds increase with the popularity of a title, because bit torrent gives download priority to those users who allow uploading from their machines.  Because of the fast speed, it is used to download tv shows, movies etc.  Linspire, a linux os developer uses bit torrent to reduce the demand on its servers.

iv. Riaa and Verizon case  -- universities caught in the middle –give up names of students  Tavani p. 239 quinn p. 182  examples

 

5.   Digital Rights Mgt p. 274

a. aimed at tracking and controlling the use of content once it has entered the market.

b. one approach—encrypt the content so that only someone with a key can decrypt and use it.

c. digital watermarking is another technique.

d. against drm

i. any technological fix is bound to fail because hackers can break the code.

ii. Undermines fair use –a customer may not be able to make a private copy for personal use even if he/she has the right to do so under trad copyright law.

iii. Also prevents people from anonymously accessing content;  MS windows media player has an embedded globally unique identifier (GUID) that allows it to keep track of all the content the user views.  Can track user’s viewing habits by uploading this info into ms server.

iv. Scen 9-1 p. 275

Why is IP a special ethical issue?

  Problem:  SW is a hybrid and doesn’t fit nicely into any one category. 

1.

a. Moral justifications for Intellectual Property

1. -Why is intellectual property and special ethical issues?

1. sw is easy to reproduce and distribute—unlike books

1. sw tied to hw which is protected by patents (separate) but h/w is useless without s/w

1. s/w has made possible a huge acceleration in the rate of innovation

1. s/w can be produced by groups over networks—makes id-ing specific authors impossible.

1. s/w can be used by many at one time.

1. Property created by laws which specify what can and cannot be owned e.g. ownership of car different from owning land.

1. S/w has challenged our tradition notions of ownership.

1. often when discussing property and ownership, we make assumptions about moral (not just legal) property rights.

· reasoning behind patent and copyright is consequentialist in that the primary aim is to create property rights which will have good effects

· others assume prop rights not a matter of social utility but a matter of justice or natural rights.

· others say creative works express personality of those who create them. Scen 8-6p. 249

Software Piracy

http://blog.ted.com/the-numbers-behind-the-copyright-math/

1.

a. Is it wrong to make a copy of proprietary s/w? p. 234

1. What is s/w piracy? P. 238

i. acquiring s/w and decompiling it to learn algorithm

ii. incorporating code written by others into your program

iii. selling s/w under false trademarks—not paying royalties

iv. 40 billon/yr lost sales and royalties if there is 1 illegal copy for every s/w pgm sold.

2. unauthorized installation of applications s/w

b. Is s/w piracy a cultural issue?

1. Hong Kong’s golden Arcade, Singapore and Funan Center, Taipei’s computer alley –all retail outlets where consumers can bur pirated copies of s/w for the cost of a disk.

2. Lotus—s/w piracy from Taiwan alone costs them $200 million annually in lost sales

c. Cross Cultural view:  In Morality of S/W Piracy by Swinyard, Rinne, Kau

1.

1. Western View:  individual freedom and benefits over societal benefits—creative development leads to  individual ownership. Therefore, copyrights and patents.

2. Eastern View:  individual developers and creators are obliged to share their developments with society:  Chinese Proverb:  He that shares is to be rewarded, he that does not, condemned.

3. Western copyright is a concept created to maintain a monopoly over distribution and production of knowledge-based products.

4. Calligraphy—Chinese invented moveable type to better duplicate mansters’ originals.

5. Therefore, we are not simply dealing with law breaking but rather with something that goes against the grain of asian culture that supports the concept of sharing.

d. S/w piracy brings up a number of issues in this country

1. Is law the answer? How seriously do we view legal rules?

1.

i. Look at NET p.239   No ‘Electronic Theft Act 1997

1.   Is there a moral duty to respect the works of others even if the laws did not exist.

1. Is s/w piracy like driving 65 in a 55 mph zone or like shoplifting?

1. Just because it is common, should we accept it?

1. Should we police our employee’s computers checking for pirated s/w?  Does this action justify spying?  Should we dismiss the employee?  Cynosure bot 238

. Nissenbaum

2. Quicken and Max –what is Millie’s claim---generous act

2. Conflicting obligations

2. Her conclusion---freedom to pursue virtue of generosity. (p. 209)  has she made her case?

2. Deontological argument:  copying sw is immoral because it constitutes a violation of moral rights and obligations --depriving a developer of earnings is unjust.

2. Do pgmers own their pgms?  Does copying violate prop rights.

2. Is a program private property---belongs to a person? P.  206 @ to  Locke .  What about cooperative effort?  S/w teams?

2. Problem with s/w p. 207  ---arriving at s/w license (208 pp.3)

2. Should s/w be more reasonably priced and should user have more choices?  S/w copying only 1 variable in the s/w market.  End user rights.