1. ETHICS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

2. Ethics

3. ACM Code of Ethics and Professionalism (Excerpt)
GENERAL MORAL IMPERATIVES
Contribute to society and human well-being
Avoid harm to others
Be honest and trustworthy
Be fair and take action not to discriminate
Honor property rights including copyrights and patent
Give proper credit for intellectual property
Respect the privacy of others
Honor confidentiality
ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP IMPERATIVES
Articulate social responsibilities
Enhance the quality of working life
Proper and authorized uses of computing and communication resources
Ensure that those affected by a system have their needs clearly articulated; validate the system to meet requirements
Protect the dignity of users

4. Intellectual Honesty McConnell, Code Complete
Refusing to pretend you’re an expert when you’re not
Readily admitting your mistakes
Trying to understand a compiler warning rather than suppressing the message
Clearly understanding your program – not compiling it to see if it works
Providing realistic status reports
Providing realistic schedule estimates and holding your ground when management asks you to adjust them

5. Whistle Blowing What are the alternatives? When is it okay?
When is it not a choice?

6. Ethics of a project intended use potential misuse consequences
fairness to the knowing users
implications for unknowing users

7. Hyperlinks Responsibility to users Responsibility to other site owners
Making it clear that its another site
Protection from inappropriate material
Responsibility to other site owners
Bypassing advertisements
Ticketmaster and Microsoft

8. SEO Techniques
Lots of opinions
Code of Ethics
Ethical Guidelines

9. Intellectual Property

10. What is Intellectual Property?
Ownership and property
Rights of ownership: Blackstonian Bundle
Exclude anyone from the property
Use it as sees fit
Receive income from
Transfer property to someone else
Intellectual property: intellectual objects

11. Intellectual Property v. Real Property
Physical objects
Zero-sum gain: one user at a time
Significant cost in both development and replication
Intellectual objects
Used by many at once
Significant cost in development, marginal cost in replication

12. Need for Protection need to recover the development costs
knowledge of future ownership is incentive to increase value

13. Arguments against IP Free flow of ideas
First amendment freedom of speech
Creative ideas build on society and culture
Noel Capon textbooks

14. Legal Protection
Copyright
Patent
Trademark

15. Copyright:  giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time

16. Copyright: How Long? 1790: 14 + renew 1909: 28 + renew
1976 : author + 50, corporate 75
1998: author + 70, corporate 95

17. Digital Rights Management
Enabling copying is criminal
Preclude through architecture
Problems
Constrains who can use
Exceptions will be too constrained for someone
Tracks who is viewing

18. Digital Millenium Copyright Act (‘66)
Illegal to …
bypass technical measures used to protect access
manufacture or distribute technologies primarily designed or produced to circumvent technical measures
remove or alter copyright management information
Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes (Aug ‘00)
8 studios sued 2600 Magazine
posting DeCSS
bypasses Content Scrambling System (CSS)
commercially distributed DVD

19. Copying copyrighted materials
Responsibility of those enabling it
Software
Network providers
Cases: software
Napster
Grockster
Bit Torrent
Cases: network providers
Verizon
Six Strikes

20. APIs: Oracle v Google
Ruling: not copyrightable

21. Patents

22. Patents Physical objects Criteria
Process, machine or composition of matter
NOT laws of nature, scientific principles, algorithms
Criteria
Novel
Not previously described
Non-obvious
Useful

23. Patents Hardware, software, processes
NOT laws of nature, scientific principles, algorithms
Can patent new applications or combinations
Criteria
Novel
Not previously described
Non-obvious
Useful
A man "has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject?" -- Thomas Jefferson

24. Software & Business Process Patents
Processes vs. algorithms
What is non-obvious?
Examples
Name Your Price (Priceline)
One-click (Amazon)
Opinions
Marco Arment
Paul Graham

25. Most Recent Cases In the last few years, situation has clarified
Bilski v Kappos – software patents ok
Machine or transformation
Alice v CLS – abstract ideas not patentable
LCS v American Airlines
Extended to business

26. Trademarks

27. Trademarks Word, phrase or symbol “Pithily” identifies
Infringement: used by someone else
Dilutions
Blurring – dissimilar products
Tarnishment – negative or compromising
Has been applied to domain names
Cybersquatting
Parody or criticism

28. Domain Names Cybersquatting
.net, .org, .com, …
Punctuation (hyphenation, etc.)
Phrases, nicknames
Parody, criticism, complaint (cybergriping)
Property rights vs. free speech
Bringing people to the site under false pretenses
Including the name in the url vs. appearing to be the site