PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

TOPIC 3. Privacy
A. KEY TERMS
Chilling effect: a situation in which one feels pressure not to do something, even though it is legal to do
so, because of fear of prosecution
Do Not Call law: prohibits telemarketers from calling phone numbers listed on the national registry
Drug Tourism: the practice of crossing a national border in order to get access to a drug that is illegal on
the other side
Libel: publishing or broadcasting false statements about another person, usually with the intent of
harming the other person's reputation
Posner, Richard: a former justice of the 7th Court of Appeals and law professor at the University of
Chicago who argues that, in the future, modern notions of privacy will be obsolete, and that we should not
be concerned about our privacy if we have nothing to hide
Privacy: broadly defined as seclusion; secrecy or concealment; freedom from intrusion
Privacy as concealment: also known as the "I have nothing to hide" argument, the concept that people
are not concerned about privacy because they do not have anything they wish to conceal
Right: a liberty or entitlement owed to a person simply because he or she is a person
Right to privacy: the right to be free from intrusion
Solove, Daniel: a professor at the George Washington University School of Law who is extremely critical
of attempts to precisely define privacy

B. DISCUSSION POINTS
How is the concept of right defined ?
Dictionaries generally give three definitions of privacy:
1) seclusion (which means being set apart or out of view)
2) secrecy or concealment
3) freedom from intrusion
These definitions conflict with each other, complicating our attempts to agree about privacy
issues.

How do most dictionaries define the right to privacy?

The right to be free from intrusion

Who popularized this definition?

Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren

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Who is Richard Posner?

Judge Richard Posner is a former justice of the 7th Court of Appeals and a law professor
at the University of Chicago; he one of the most respected legal minds of our age. Posner
believes that there is no fundamental right to privacy and that people are interested in
privacy only because they want to conceal their own wrongdoing or prevent
embarrassment.

What are the three parts of Posners argument regarding privacy?

Pre-modern peoples (living in small villages or tribal cultures) had no real ability to
conceal anything about themselves, and therefore no privacy. It is perfectly natural for
people to live with little or no privacy; Contemporary people are willing to give up their
private information, and become transparent, in return for very small financial incentives
or improvements in convenience. This proves that we do not value individual privacy;
concealment is most useful to criminals, and least useful to honest people. Therefore
privacy is mostly a social harm that reduces safety, not a social good.

Who is Daniel Solove, and what is his opinion on attempts to define privacy?
Daniel Solove is a professor at the George Washington University School of Law in
Washington DC; he is extremely critical of such attempts to precisely define privacy;
Soloves approach is to work bottom-up instead of top-down. That is, instead of starting
with a single clear definition, and then discovering that not all privacy problems are
covered by the definition, he starts with a list of the common kinds of privacy problems.

What is one major way aggregation has contributed to the success of social networking
services?
Google, Facebook, Netflix, and most other successful Internet companies make their
money by building dossiers of their users likes and dislikes. This allows the Web site to
carefully select ads that the user is likely to be interested in, maximizing the effectiveness
of the ad space.

How has an increase in accessibility to personal information changed privacy?

When data becomes easier to access, people find new uses for it. The book provides the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a reference. Just as in the case of aggregation, increased
accessibility creates a potential privacy harm that, though possible in the past, was
unlikely to occur.
GROUP DISCUSSION.
1.

What is your opinion about Plagiarism Preventer. If professors first notified students that
their uploaded papers would be shared with law enforcement, would this remove any
reasonable expectation of the students privacy?

2.

Some experts have argued against the idea of a reasonable expectation of privacy,
claiming that it introduces subjectivity into decisions. Their claim is that whether or not
something is private depends on context specifically, whether or not the person thought
he or she had privacy at the time. Is this dependence on context a strength or a weakness
when used to interpret the BILL OF RIGHTS of our CONSTITUTION?
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3.

4.

Imagine that a writer from Country A posts an article on a server residing in Country B,
about someone who resides in Country C. The article is readable only by people in
Country D (readers from other countries trying to access the article receive an error
message). If countries A, B, C, and D have very different libel laws, which countrys laws
ought to apply, and why?
Besides crime, what are some other beneficial aspects of surveillance in a modern society?
Have your students respond and elaborate.

5.

In what ways can social networking be liberating? Tell your students to name at least one
way the features of social networking can be oppressive. Ultimately, are social networking
services likely to be liberating or oppressive to a society?

6.

Should the right to be let alone apply only to private life, or should it be in effect in
public areas such as the workplace and restaurants?

7.

Cell phone companies can find the location of a cell phone with high accuracy with
todays technology. This information is often used by law to solve crimes. Should it be
legal for law enforcement to get this information without a warrant, or should the data
provided by cell phones be protected under the Bill of Rights?

C. CASES; PROJECT and RESOURCES

Case: PRIVACY ISSUES

1.

Consider your PROJECT 1. COMMON ISSUES IN COMPUTER ETHICS.

CREATE A CASE SITUATION ANALYSIS. Use the following guide;
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.

Background of the issue (PRIVACY)

Situational Analysis
Problem Statement
Alternative Courses of Action
Solution/s
Conclusion
Recommendations

Project 5. This article was written in June of 2010. Search online to see new developments that have
been made in this case.

List the components of Soloves taxonomy that are most appropriate to determining the morality
of this case.

Project 6. Big Think: Judge Richard Posners Idea of Privacy

http://bigthink.com/richardposner

Project 7. Article regarding virtual currency and privacy issues in video games
http://www.fastcompany.com/1782934/meet-the-video-game-lawyers

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TOPIC 4. Intellectual and Intangible Property
A. KEY TERMS
Algorithm: a mathematically precise set of steps for computing something
Author: according to U.S. copyright law, a creator of a copyrighted work
BitTorrent: the most common currently used peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol; allows companies and
common users alike to deliver one large file to millions of users by breaking it up into smaller chunks for
transmittal
Commons: resources that are not owned by any one person, but instead jointly owned by everyone
Contributory infringement: an act in which an infringement committed by one person would not have
happened without the help of another entity
Copyright: a government authority that protects creative works
Copyright term: the duration of a copyright
Counterfeiting: the illegal duplication of physical media
DeCSS: a program that removes the copy protection from DVDs and allows users to watch DVDs on
open-source operating systems like Linux
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): a law passed in 1998 that updated many parts of the U.S.
Code to deal with modern copyright issues; criticized on the grounds that it makes fair use, and exercising
ones right under the doctrine of first sale, legally impossible
Digital rights management (DRM): a collection of technologies that work together to ensure that
copyrighted content can be only viewed by the person who purchased it
Digital watermarking: embedding small errors into a digital image so that someone viewing the image
cannot see the errors with the naked eye, but a special computer program can use the errors to identify the
source of the image
Doctrine of first sale: a policy that states that authors are not entitled to an additional royalty if and when
their works are resold, as long as no new copy is made
DVD Copy Control Association (DVDCCA): the group responsible for licensing DVD players
Fair use: the right to use a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting,
teaching, scholarship, or research, as applicable to copyright law
Index site: a Web site that provides search functionality for protocols like BitTorrent by providing keys to
unlock seeded files
Invention: any new and useful process, machine, [article of] manufacture, or composition of matter, or
any new and useful improvement thereof; protected by patents
Key server: a computer on the Internet that provides the key to unlock a file to authorized users
Orphaned work: a copyrighted work that is still within its copyright term, but no longer has a copyright
owner
Patent: a government authority that protects a new and useful invention
Piracy: the intentional illegal downloading of copyrighted material
Plagiarism: according to Richard Posner, copying that the copier claims (whether explicitly or implicitly,
deliberately or carelessly) is original with him and the claim causes the copiers audience to behave
otherwise than it would if it knew the truth
Price discrimination: the practice of charging different people different prices for the same thing
Prim: a colloquial term for primitive objects in the virtual world of Second Life that resemble simple
shapes such as cubes, spheres, cones, and tubes
Real money transaction (RMT): virtual goods purchased with real money
Region-coding: a technology that DVD and Blu-Ray player manufacturers include in their machines that
prevents users from playing videodiscs from other parts of the world
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Rootkit: a piece of software that allows an unauthorized user to override security and get administrator
access to a computer
Terms of Service (ToS): a set of terms and conditions set by the provider of a service
Torrent: a key used to locate a downloadable file
Trade dress: the look and feel of a product or its packaging
Trademark: a legally registered word, phrase, symbol, or other item that identifies a particular product,
service, or corporation; used synonymously with the word brand in the world of marketing
Trade secret: a secret technique or procedure used by a company in manufacturing its products
Vicarious infringement: the refusal of an entity to prevent or police an infringement that occurs in an
area under their supervision
Virtual goods: items of property that are rivalrous, nontangible, not services, and which rely on some
online system for their existence

B. DISCUSSION POINTS
What is a rootkit?
A rootkit is a piece of software that allows an unauthorized user to override security and get
administrator access to a computer

What happened in the EVE Online investment fraud scheme led by the character Cally?
In 2006, Cally started the EVE Intergalactic Bank. Cally took deposits of the games currency
(the Interstellar Kredit, or ISK) and paid interest on these deposits. He claimed that he was
reinvesting the money, but in actuality he was pocketing most of it. He reportedly walked away
with 790 billion ISK, which at the time was worth about 170,000 U.S. dollars. Although he
bragged about the scam, he was never punished; since players in EVE Online are encouraged to
steal each others cargo, attack each other, or extort money by threatening to attack, what Cally
did was within the rules of the game.

How does the book discern piracy from theft?

The book refers to piracy as the intentional illegal copying of copyrighted material. The book
emphasizes that there are morally significant differences between copying intangible property
(piracy) and stealing physical objects (theft).

Who wrote this excerpt in 1813, regarding the difficulty of own ones ideas: If nature
has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the
action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess
as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the
possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
Thomas Jefferson

What are the five key questions to ask when attempting to fully understand each type of
intellectual property protection?
What type of thing can be protected? What rights are reserved for the creator of the
work? What rights are reserved for the public? How does one obtain the protection for a
work? How long does the protection last?

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In U.S. copyright law, how is the term author defined?

The term is used for all creators, including choreographers, architects, etc.
GROUP DISCUSSION
1.

Point out that some software companies claim that one cannot publish reviews of
their software without first getting written consent. Ask your students why or why
not this is likely to hold up in court.

2.

Ask your students to consider whether what Google does is morally superior to
what Napster did. Have them explain their reasoning using one of the ethical
theories discussed in Topic 1 to support their answers.

3.

Was what Napster did morally permissible? Ask your students to use one of the
ethical theories from Chapter 1 to support their answers.

4.

Should it be legal to print a T-shirt with the Mona Lisa on it, without paying a
royalty? Ask your students to explain their reasoning.

5.

Should it be legal to print a T-shirt with Disneys Phineas and Ferb on it, without
paying a royalty? Again, ask your students to explain their reasoning.

6.

The Nintendo Wii has a particularly recognizable design and trade dress. Immediately after
its release, a variety of companies started releasing knock-off game systems that looked
like the Wii and had a similar price. Ask your students to research some of these systems
on the Internet, and then either defend or refute the following position: Nintendo should
have been able to stop these companies from selling game systems that looked similar to
the Nintendo Wii.

7.

One of the most famous trade secrets is the formula for Coca-Cola. Ask your students to
imagine that someone was able to figure out the formula without stealing it. Should that
person be allowed to make and sell a drink that tastes exactly like Coca-Cola?

C. CASES; PROJECT and RESOURCES

Case: PROPERTY ISSUES

1. Consider your PROJECT 1. COMMON ISSUES IN COMPUTER ETHICS.
CREATE A CASE SITUATION ANALYSIS. Use the following guide;
a. Background of the issue (PRIVACY)
b. Situational Analysis
c. Problem Statement
d. Alternative Courses of Action
e. Solution/s
f. Conclusion
g. Recommendations

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