AUTHOR
David N Wilson and Jim Underwood

ABSTRACT

Advances in information technology have had tremendous impact on the nature of work, on organisations and on society in generally. Cheap yet powerful hardware, telecommunications and data networks, and distributed databases have enabled organisations to re-engineer their business processes and to change the way they do business. One specific example is teleworking, where employees work from home via an ‘information super-highway’. Despite the well documented personal, organisational and society benefits, many workers prefer the social contact of office work to the face-less anonymity of teleworking. Does teleworking provide a means for introverts to ‘come out of their shell’ and contribute to organisations?

AUTHOR
Fred Greguras, Michael R Egger and Sandy J. Wong

ABSTRACT

A different type of highway builder may take us into the interactive future. News, entertainment, education and other productions are ready at the on-ramp and may eventually be carried across the U.S. by the information super highway network. Many of the productions will contain numerous and diverse digitized works, e.g., software, motion pictures, video, graphics, music and photographs. Intellectual property rights, particularly copyright, are critical to the creation of productions or titles that contain such multimedia content. Currently, in many instances, pre-existing works are not used in such content because obtaining such rights is costly and time-consuming. The greatest creativity and ultimate value in multimedia products will likely come from new creativity combined with the creativity of pre-existing works.

This paper summarizes the copyright and licensing issues involved in creating multimedia content, describes activities in Japan with repect to such issues, and proposes a U.S. multimedia clearinghouse. There is no U.S. clearinghouse for identifying who can authorize the right to use copyrighted content in a multimedia product. Eventually, such a voluntary clearinghouse could be a “one-stop” license shopping center where the content user pays a specified fee for a set of rights. The clearinghouse could provide a means to fairly compensate the owner of the pre-existing work while making it easier to secure license rights to such work.

The U.S. appears to have an initial worldwide, competitive advantage in multimedia productions and titles because of its lead in market-driven creativity in software, particularly in mass-market application softwre that fills a market need. For example, one key competitor, Japan, is weak in mass-market application software other than video game software. The availability or non-availability of a clearinghouse could increase the U.S. competitive advantage or provide the opportunity for others to catch up.

AUTHOR
Seppo Visala

ABSTRACT

This paper suggests an ethical priciple that helps to oversome competing interests in organisations and to achieve a ‘rationally motivated’ consensus, especially about power positions that ensue from changes in organisational tasks due to information systems development. It draws on Habermas’s idea of communicative rationality and Rawls’s idea of rational ethics, the idea of intial situation. It introduces an abstract universalisation principle of discourse and critically evaluates the possibilities for approximating it in current organisations with respect to the political games in them in general and its challenges to participatory systems development in particular. A set of recommendations to planning will be derived from the principle.

AUTHOR
Blaise W. Liffick

PUBLISHED IN
ETHICOMP Journal Vol 1 Issue 1

ABSTRACT

One of the approaches to teaching about the ethical issues related to computer technology is the use of the ethical scenario (or case study). Unfortunately, few authors of texts for this arrea give any concrete methodology for analyzing such scenarios. Students, therefore, tend to flounder when asked to, for instance, write an essay about some event depicted in a scenario. This paper provides a methodology for analyzing such scenarios.

AUTHOR
Paul Sturges, C Pritchett and B Scully

ABSTRACT

Librarianship is at present in the midst of an ethical debate. To be honest this makes what is taking place sound rather more exciting than it really is, but there has certainly been much more literature appearing on ethical questions in librarianship since the mid 1980s than ever before. What is more, a number of library and information associations (the Library Association and Institute of Information Scientists in the UK and the Canadian Library Association will be mentioned here) are either in the process of reviewing aspects of their ethical codes, and related policy documents, or are contemplating doing so. Two reasons for can be identified. The first is that such codes have always been flawed and inadequate and therefore demand renewal, and the second is that changing circumstances in libraries and related institutions, most specifically the extensive use of computer technology, require serious rethinking of codes devised in an age dominated by print. This paper will naturally concentrate on the second of these two suggestions, but a word about the existing state of library ethics, and their inadequacies, is necessary to explain the kind of changes that are needed.

AUTHOR
Mary Prior

PUBLISHED IN
ETHICOMP Journal Vol 1 Issue 1

ABSTRACT

Much of the literature related to computer ethics has a narrow focus; there has been little discussion among Information Systems (IS) professionals of the uses to which their work may be put. Some of the more harmful uses of computer technology are discussed. The case is argued for a Hippocratic oath for IS professionals.