1. Intellectual Property, Information, and the Common Good Michael C. McFarland, SJ

2. Intellectual Property Intellectual Property is objects that are intangible although they usually have tangible expressions. Tangible works of the mind such as music, books, and videos  Example: a book is property but the intellectual property is the ink inside the book

3. Types of Intellectual Property Intellectual property can range from lyrics in a song to poems, to programming code and in essence one’s ideas. Copyright Trademark Patent Industrial design right Trade secret

4. How Technology Ties in with Intellectual Property Intellectual Property and technology are closely related. Intellectual property has increased and has become easier to steal and forage ideas of others. With this comes into play moral and ethical issues.  In the area of technology, ethical situations involving intellectual property have become more prominent in the past years.

5. How much control… Trying to control intellectual property leads to many questions, such as  Who is allowed to view it?  Who can use it?  Who is to benefit from using or viewing it? All of these questions come from the idea of what legal and moral protection is available and when and to what extent should those actions be implemented.

6. Conflicts over Intellectual Property: Five Cases 1. Plagiarism 2. Software Piracy 3. Repacking Data and Databases 4. Reverse Engineering 5. Copying in Transmission

7. Plagiarism Educators, especially those in higher education, are seeing an increasing number of cases of plagiarism from the Internet and other electronic sources. Plagiarism, of course, has been a problem for a long time, but the easy access to vast amounts of electronic information dramatically increases the possibilities, and the temptations.

8. Software Piracy In April, 1994, an MIT student, David LaMacchia, was indicted for allegedly setting up and running a computer bulletin board that allowed people on the Internet to exchange copies of commercial software. LaMacchia was accused of wire fraud and the interstate transportation of stolen property. If convicted he could have been sent to prison and assessed fines of to $250,000. Ultimately the case was thrown out on a technicality. Lamacchia did not benefit monetarily from the arrangement and did not download any of the software himself. Therefore his offense did not come under existing law. Software publishers estimate that more than half of all copies of their products in use in the United States are unauthorized.

9. Repacking Data and Databases A company named ProCD published a CD-ROM containing a large compilation of telephone listings. A University of Wisconsin graduate student put all the data on the CD-ROM onto his Web site and charged users to access it. The company sued, claiming it had invested $10 million in collecting the data, putting it into an easily accessible form, packaging and marketing it, while the student was cutting into their sales and making profits himself with almost no effort (Samuelson, 1996b). ProCD won, but only on the narrow grounds that the student had violated the shrink-wrap license agreement that came with the CD- ROM. There has been much debate recently about whether databases and the data in them should receive more protection than currently afforded by copyright law.

10. Reverse Engineering Reverse engineering is the translation of cryptic code back into human-readable form to. Developers often find they must study the actual code or hardware design of the system their product must work with in order to get the interface right. They must do reverse engineering since the original code or design is usually jealously guarded by the designers. Reverse engineering is often a necessity for reliable software design. However, the practice has been challenged in a number of lawsuits, on the grounds that the company doing the reverse engineering could use the insight gained to produce a competing program without doing the expensive design work required in the original.

11. Copying in Transmission The Internet, like most large computer networks today, uses so- called “store and forward” architecture. No computer in the chain has complete knowledge of or control over the route the message will follow. For the sake of reliability, each computer keeps a copy of the message after sending it and holds the copy until it has received verification that the message has reached its destination. This procedure is used for all kinds of network transactions, including email, file transfers, and Web pages. Store and forward transmission is a well-established and universally accepted technology. However, with the growing concern over the protection of electronic intellectual property, it has begun to be questioned.

12. Philosophical Justification for Intellectual Property Justin Hughes, in his masterful article, “The Philosophy of Intellectual Property” (Hughes, 1988), gives two basic justifications for intellectual property rights.  The first, which he calls the Lockean justification, is often called the labor theory of property.  The other justification Hughes discusses is what he calls the Hegelian, or personality, theory of intellectual property.

13. A More Balanced View The fundamental problem with intellectual property as an ethical category is that it is purely individualistic. It focuses on the creator/developer of the intellectual work and what he or she is entitled to. It ignores the social role of the creator and of the work itself, thus overlooking their ethically significant relationships with the rest of society.