The Information Age: Property & New Technologies & Information, Computers, the Internet, and Business.

The Information Age: Property & New Technologies

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Information, Computers, the Internet, and Business

If this looks like last week…

That’s because it’s what we didn’t get to last week.

We will skip the scheduled chapter for this week altogether.

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Intellectual Property• Tangible property comprises physical items.• Real property refers to land, buildings & land add-ons.• Intangible property consists of money, stocks, bonds, and

other financial securities.• Intellectual property is constituted by a bundle of rights

governing products of the mind or intellect. – Rights that one has with respect to these products are different from

the bundles of rights that constitute tangible, real, or intangible property.

– Intellectual property is significantly different from the other types of property because it can be shared with others without losing any part of it oneself.

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Trademarks

• Trademarks are defined by the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada (IPIC) as:– “A word, design, number, two- or three-dimensional form,

sound or color, or a combination of two or more of these elements which a trader uses to distinguish his/her products or services from those of… competitors and serves to establish goodwill with the consumer.”

• Trademarks, unlike copyrights and patents, do not expire after a certain length of time, and the rights one has continue indefinitely.

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Trade Secrets 1/2

• Broadly, the term refers to all knowledge developed by a firm, which it guards as proprietary.

• Narrowly, it designates an alternative to copyrights & patents as ways to protect inventions, formulas, etc.

• Three indicators are useful in determining what info. is appropriately secret, what information belongs to a given firm, and hence what information an employee has a moral and a legal obligation not to reveal.– First is the amount of security the company employs to

maintain the secrecy of the information.– Second is the amount of money that a firm has spent in

developing the information.– Third is the value of the information to a competitor.

Trade Secrets 2/2

• The distinction between the info. & knowledge that belong appropriately to the employer & the info. & knowledge that belong appropriately to the employee is not always an easy one to draw.

• Firms claims to secrecy have to be balanced against claims of the employees to freedom of speech & movement, & against claims of the government, stockholders, and the public to information that concerns them and that they have a right to know.

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Copyrights and Patents

• While trade secrecy is the legal right to keep one’s info., ideas, plans, projects, & so on secret, copy-rights and patents give their holders certain rights with respect to their products on condition of their making them public in certain prescribed ways.

• Copyrights were instituted in order to protect the written expression of ideas.

• Patents don’t cover the expression of ideas but inventions, machines, processes, or matter structure. – Patents give inventors protection for their innovation.

Patents do not prohibit reverse engineering.

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Law, Ethics, and Fair Use• In most jurisdictions there are legal exceptions to

copyright grouped under the heading of fair use. • Fair use applies to authorized use of copyrighted

material without permission under certain conditions, including but not limited to the condition that the items used be for personal, noncommercial use.

• Allowed are “purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.”

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Property: Information & Software

• What constitutes intellectual property must be determined before we can make valid judgments about who, if anyone, properly owns such property, under what conditions, & for how long.

• Computer programs do not fit the copyright pattern either obviously or very well.

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Data & Information

• Knowledge can be of facts, and in part knowledge consists of facts as known.

• Understanding consists of knowledge that is integrated in some unified way and evaluated.

• The word information is sometimes used to include data, facts, and knowledge, as when we speak of information systems.

• What computer systems can be properly said to contain and manipulate are data.

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Protection of Computer Software

• Because neither patents nor copyrights were originally developed with computers in mind, numerous difficulties have arisen.

• The line between software and hardware is becoming less and less clear, as is the line between physical and intellectual property.  

• Attempting to solve moral issues related to computers is often complicated by the lack of any established and agreed-upon practices.

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Program Property Rights Between Employer and Employee

• The wise firm will establish guidelines and ground rules governing computer use and programs before problems arise.

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Copying Programs and Fair Use• The copying of computer programs for sale is not

covered by the doctrine of fair use. • When done by commercial firms or groups in other

countries, it is often called piracy. • The development of peer-to-peer technology on the

Internet, which makes it possible to share large data-bases (music, films, and the like) to many users has: – Made legislators consider what legal protection may be needed.

– Made producers of music & films to reconsider how they market their products & how they protect themselves against copying. 

• Copying music was seen initially by many as comparable to taping a movie, or taping a song from TV or radio. – The appearance of peer-to-peer tech. that allowed downloading

of MP3 music was different from copying from a public source.

Intellectual Property and the Internet• U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act

of 1998 gave protection to music, films, & TV shows that were easily copied & were being spread by peer-to-peer tech. over the Internet to millions.

Patents and Software• Patent protection is much

stronger than copyright protection, • Patents preclude any use without

a license of the protected item– Even if one arrives at the same item

independently.

Patents and Pharmaceutical Drugs• People & countries do not complain about the patent

system with respect to inventions and machines. – Drugs are seen as different since they are needed to save

lives, not like other inventions that make life easier.

• The argument that poor people & countries cannot afford the new drugs until the patents expire does not mean that patent protection is morally unjustified. – The question is whether new drugs can be made available

without eliminating patents & cutting off development.– A related issue is whether under conditions of emergency

should pharmaceutical companies that have to bear the financial burden of giving away their drugs.

– Should emergency costs be shared by governments & perhaps other firms operating in less developed countries.

Debate

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Business and Computers

• There are areas in which the introduction of the computer into business either raises familiar problems in a different way or raises new problems.

(1) computer crime;

(2) computers and corporate responsibility;

(3) computers and privacy; and

(4) the changing nature of work

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Computer Crime• Stealing via computer is immoral, just as is

stealing by any other means.

• But stealing by computer has raised a number of problems for businesses.

• The computer theft in business is of 3 types: 1. The actual stealing of funds or assets.

Identity Theft and Phishing.

2. The stealing of information. Corporate Espionage.

3. The stealing of computer time. Personal use of company computers. Surreptitious entry into private systems or files.

Viruses, Worms, and Spam• There is general consensus that launching mal-

ware is ethically wrong, even when not illegal. • A consensus has been slower in building on the

use of spam. – May be some justification for some forms of spam.– There may be a small number of receivers who value

receiving at least some of the ads they receive. But they seem to be a small minority

compared with the large majority for whom spam is at best an annoyance & at worst a costly intrusion upon their time.

Computers & Corp. Responsibility

• Human beings are morally responsible for the harm done to other human beings by computers or through their use.

• Human beings are also responsible for any use to which computers are put.

• Computers, like other areas of modern tech., are not good or bad in themselves. - They can be used to benefit or to harm human beings &

whether how they are used is up to the human beings.

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Computers and Privacy

• Privacy is a relative term. Notions of privacy vary greatly from society to society.

• Two kinds of privacy have special relevance with respect to computers:– Information privacy– Electronic privacy.

Information Privacy• Information privacy refers to a claimed right of

individuals to keep info. about themselves private. • The issue of information privacy often turns on the

distinction between data and facts. • In the U.S. commercial interests legally trump those

of individuals. Most anything revealed, through commercial transactions belongs to the business.

• Individual laws protect certain kinds of information, such as medical records to some extent, and the record of the videotapes one rents. – For the most part the rule is that the default is opt in, – If one wants to opt out of having ones info. traded, or used

for purposes other than those for which it was revealed, one must take specific steps to make ones wishes known.

Information Privacy• Data mining is a technique of using special software

to sift through large databases in order to derive information that is implicit but not explicit in the data.

• In data mining, information that is provided for one purpose is screened to see if by inference or statistical correlation or some other method, new useful information can be derived.

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Electronic Privacy

• Electronic privacy refers primarily to the use by employees of email and the Internet.

• The status of email, however, is legally comparable neither to regular mail nor to telephone use.

• Courts have decided computers belong to the firm that purchases & owns them, & everything on the computer is firm property, including email sent / received by employees.

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The Changing Nature of Work

• Flextime and Teleworking

• Outsourcing and Expert Systems

• The Digital Divide

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Case Analysis

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CASE ANALYSISCASE ANALYSIS

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