AUTHOR
Ali Acilar and Muzaffer Aydemir

ABSTRACT

Computer is one of the important technological developments affecting our daily lives. Computers are changing almost everything in our personal and social life: from communication to education, from business to entertainment. Computers and Internet have become an integral part of our society. There is no doubt that these technologies have had considerable impact on our lives. However, the tradeoff between the benefits and dangers of these information technologies for a person or a society is controversial. Computers and Internet have enlightened many people but these technologies have also raised some ethical issues such as piracy, privacy invasion, unauthorized access and use of computer systems. Mason (1986) was summarized ethical issues related to information technology usage by means of an acronym – PAPA (Privacy, Accuracy, Property, and Accessibility). Piracy is one of the major ethical issues that have arisen in the context of information technology usage. Software piracy is globally widespread phenomena and costs software manufacturers billions of dollars annually. The ease of copying software has made the issue of piracy very well-known and widespread around the world.

Technological developments create new opportunities for action and new sets of choices that are ultimately of a moral nature (Mullen and Horner, 2004). As living in the information age, also known commonly as the computer age or information era, we constantly confronted with important technological changes and the need to create new attitudes towards new situations arose from the computer technology (Masrom and Ismail, 2008). As the use of computers and Internet has become widespread, misuses of these technologies have also increased dramatically (Banerjee et al, 1998). The easy of reaching, storing, changing and transmitting information provided by computers and Internet has made unethical behaviors much easier, particularly among students in the academic environments (Abdul Karim, Zamzuri, and Nor, 2009). Internet has provided a new dimension to human computer interactions. There is no doubt that proper use of computers and Internet is beneficial to both, students and academicians in the universities. However students enter universities from different backgrounds with different experiences and many students are unaware of ethical issues of computer usage such as software piracy (Cohen and Cornwell, 1989). According to Calluzzo and Cante (2004) students had misconceptions about what represented ethical and unethical behaviors in the use of software and information technology and systems.

It is possible that if university students are uncertain about what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate behavior then this uncertainty will be carried forward into their workplaces after graduation (Calluzzo and Cante, 2004; King and Case, 2007). Employee abuse of company information technology resources can result in lawsuit or dismissal. Even though some organization adopted code of ethics for members, not every computer user and information system professional is a member of these organizations, and therefore does not necessarily follow these codes (Harris, 2000). Many companies depend on people who are computer literate and computer users face ethical problems everyday in the work-place. For these reasons university students who are future employees and managers should be aware of ethical computer usage before graduation (Pierce and Henry, 1996; Calluzzo and Cante, 2004).

There are some important studies about computer ethics awareness and attitudes among university students in the developed countries. These studies investigated the effects of various independent variables such as gender, age, study majors, relationships, PC ownership and PC experience to students’ attitudes about software piracy and other issues of computer ethics. However, related studies about computer ethics awareness and attitudes among university students in the developing countries are limited.

Gender is one of the most heavily researched variables in the literature of ethics. There are many studies that have investigated the role of gender in ethical decision making, beliefs, perceptions and attitudes. There is a debate about whether females are more ethical than males. Some studies found that females are more concerned about ethical issues than males. However, some researchers found that gender has no significant effect on ethical judgements. Although research on “gender and ethics” and “gender and information technologies usage” has increased, a few of the studies are available about gender issues in computer ethics especially software piracy. Given these issues, the main purpose of this study is to examine whether gender differences influence student attitudes on software piracy and the following hypothesis is proposed.

H0(1): Female and male students have the same ethical beliefs about software piracy.

The paper will first give an overview about the relevant literature and then test the hypothesis of the study through a survey on a sample of students in a public university in Turkey. Study results will be discussed for the researchers as well as the practitioners and compared with previous studies.

REFERENCES

Abdul Karim Nor Shahriza, Zamzuri Nurul Hidayah Ahmad, and Nor Yakinah Muhamad (2009). Exploring the relationship between Internet ethics in university students and the big five model of personality. Computers & Education, doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2009.01.001, (Article in Press).

Banerjee Debasish, Cronan Timothy Paul, and Jones Thomas W. (1998), “Modeling IT Ethics- A Study in Situational Ethics”, MIS Quarterly, Volume 22, Number 1, 31–60.

Calluzzo Vincent J., and Cante Charles J. (2004). Ethics in Information Technology and Software Use. Journal of Business Ethics, 51, 301–312.

Cohen Eli and Cornwell Larry (1989). College Students Believe Piracy is Acceptable. CIS Educator Forum, 1(3), 2–5.

Harris Albert L. (2000). IS Ethical Attitudes Among College Students: A Comparative Study. The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference, 2000, v. 17.

Mason Richard O. (1986). Four Ethical Issues of the Information Age. Management Information Systems Quarterly, Volume 10, Number 1, 5–12.

Masrom Maslin, and Ismail Zuraini (2008), “Computer Security and Computer Ethics Awareness: A Component of Management Information System” International Symposium on Information Technology, ITSim 2008 26-28 Aug. 2008. Volume 3, 1–7.

Mullen Hilary, and Horner David Sanford (2004). Ethical problems for e-government: an evaluative framework. Electronic Journal of e-Government, 2(3), 187-196.

Pierce Margaret Anne, and Henry John W. (1996), “Computer Ethics: The Role of Personal, Informal, and Formal Codes”, Journal of Business Ethics, 15, 425–437.

AUTHOR
Marty J. Wolf, Keith W. Miller and Frances S. Grodzinsky

ABSTRACT

Typically, ethical analysis of Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, either separately or as a collective in contrast to proprietary software, implicitly has treated all categories of software as ethically equivalent in all circumstances. In this paper we explore the notion that some categories of software elicit different ethical concerns and that it is important to include those concerns in any analysis. By analyzing the ethics of Free Software (FS) and Proprietary Software (PS) in the context of a particular category of software, we develop a nuanced approach that helps clarify the ethical value of each type of software. We also tease apart the definition of free software to explore the question of whether there is some middle ground between FS and PS that captures key ideas in the ethical analysis of some software categories.

For the purposes of our paper, we define Proprietary Software (PS) to be software that is developed by either an individual or company and is made available to the public and other businesses only in binary form. Furthermore, it is licensed in such a way that restricts its further distribution and prevents reverse engineering.

In order for a piece of software to be considered Free Software (FS) it must be licensed under an approved Free Software License (FSF License, 2007). However, for our purposes, the four software freedoms provide more clarity about what those licenses are designed to accomplish (FSF Definition, 2007). Briefly, software that is “free” is affords four freedoms:

• Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
• Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs.
• Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
• Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

In addition, Free Software usually includes the notion of “copyleft”, which uses copyright law to ensure that all derivative works of Free Software are also Free Software.

Note that Freedoms 1 and 3 require access to the source code. In the analysis in this paper we find times when access to the source code is sufficient to mitigate ethical concerns. We will call all software that has its source code available in a standard electronic format, Source Code Available Software (SCAS). This is not to be confused with Open Source Software (OSS), which also has a formal definition that includes more than just available source code (Coar, 2007). While there are some important differences between FS and OSS, those differences do not impact the discussion in this paper and we use FS to refer to both.

For clarity, when we talk about software type, we are referring to whether it is FS, PS, SCAS or some modification of one of these types. We use the term software category to refer to a collection of similar pieces of software that all accomplish roughly the same purpose. Some categories will admit subcategories. For example, the category of “Productivity Software” includes the subcategory of “Word Processing Software.”

In the paper, we make the claim that the type of software is a relevant factor when attempting an ethical analysis of a software category, whether it be the development, distribution, or use of software. We explore the relevance of the software’s type by examining the ethical tension between FS and PS that stems from the two different types of licenses. We consider a variety of categories of software and, using the lenses of both FS and PS, develop support for normative statements regarding the software development landscape. One interesting category that we consider is web software. Web software can be divided into two broad subcategories: server-side software and client-side software. Each subcategory offers a different perspective on the FS questions. Our analysis builds a case that there is a strong ethical argument for ensuring an environment in which FS web browsers can be developed. Our claim has an implication that extends beyond software; the ethical analysis also requires that the protocols and languages used for web communication be open and available as well.

In the remainder of the paper we consider other categories of software and accumulate evidence to support the claim that as society’s use of software changes and the role of software in society changes, the ethical analysis for categoies of software must necessarily be repeated. We give compelling ethical arguments that some categories should be FS, that some applications should be PS, and that some applications ethically can be either one. We also find that there are software categories that are most ethically robust when both FS and PS are available. Furthermore, we find that there are times when company involvement in both FS and PS is ethically appropriate, economically fruitful and technically advantageous. We conclude by noting that an overarching ethical concern surrounding software development is ensuring the software development environment has the agility to allow both FS and PS to make positive ethical contributions.

AUTHOR
Janusz Wielki

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with the problem of the impact of search engines on the functioning of contemporary organizations. In the first part an overview of the situation connected with the growing role of search engines in the business environment of contemporary organizations and the consequences of this process is briefly provided. The second part is focused on an analysis of the two basic forms of influence of search engines on contemporary organizations: direct and indirect. Finally the most significant conclusions and suggestions are provided

AUTHOR
John Weckert and Craig McDonald

ABSTRACT

There is much discussion about computer mediated communication but less about computer mediated perception and its effects on cognition, concepts and language. In this paper we focus on the relationship between information technology and how humans think, perceive and behave. An understanding of this relationship underpins our capacity to ethically use, or to avoid, technology.

Human experience of the world is the internalising of information, mediated by our conceptual structures, sometimes called our beliefs, opinions, views or values. These structures are the fabric of our thinking selves, the framework within which our perceptions and actions are constructed. They are not static; unlike programs in some sort of cerebral computing unit, they are being constantly built and modified for us by our experience.

But increasingly we work in a designed information environment where the characteristics of the computing technology are imprinted on the information and, through our experience of it, imprinted on us. The very way we think and perceive the world are being affected by information technology. It is possible that our lives are becoming easier in some ways because of Information Technology, but also becoming poorer as we lose touch with the non-virtual world and with more direct ways of perceiving that world. In losing skills, including skills of perception, to technology are we losing important human capacities too?

There is a vast literature which supports the view that language, as well as being a vehicle for communication, also influences how individuals experience the world. (For example see seminal works by Whorf, Wittgenstein, Kuhn and Quine). The basic idea is that words are more than labels which are attached to individual bits of the world. The view that words are just labels has been called the ‘myth of the museum’ (Quine). Language is closely linked with an individual’s conceptual structure. If we know the meaning of a word or phrase or its use, then we have a certain concept or concepts. Commonly, learning the new word, or term, involves acquiring the new concept and in some cases learning to perceive the world slightly differently. Suppose that we are tasting wine with an expert. She talks about acidity, astringency, oak flavours, and the like, of the various wines. She tells us which ones will improve with age, and which should be consumed now. Some of the features which she points out we can recognise, but others we cannot. In many cases we cannot taste or smell what she does. It is not merely a matter of us not knowing the relevant terms, nor of not knowing which attributes indicate aging potential or whatever. Often, even when the feature is explained to us we still not able to taste or smell it. Again with time and help we may be able to acquire this ability, but we certainly do not have it at the moment.

We suggest that Information Technology, considered broadly to include devices containing processing chips, which now pervades much of our lives, influences our cognitive abilities at least partly through mediating our perceptions of the world and partly through pre-processing. There is nothing wrong with a photographer using light meters providing that the skill of assessing light conditions without their use is not lost. The possession of that skill makes for a richer experience of the world. Use instruments rather than sight and touch to assess wool quality, but do not lose the ability to do it through visual and tactile experience. Use automatic pilots, but do not allow human pilots to become mere instrument readers. There are richer experiences in life than the reading of gauges. Use computers to assist in the administration of courses but do not forget that knowledge is too rich to be placed into boxes with obscure codes. Modern information technology is hastening the process of seeing everything in life in terms of the simply measurable. Measurement is useful, but it only concerns a small part of human existence.

Information technology, and the language embedded in it, increasingly stands between our senses and the physical world in which we live. The technology pre-processes data from the world imposing on it the conceptual structures of the technology developer. This is in marked contract to information technology of previous ages. The telescope, for example, enhances the work of the eye, but electronic sensors and systems (for example that report an enemy missile launch) have embedded the concepts of the technology developer and sponsor. The ethical capacity of one acting on information pre-processed by technology is reduced.

The multi-media modes of information technology work in a different manner to interfere with our ethical capacity. Rather than presenting processed measures of the world these technologies modify sensory input itself. Virtual reality augmented reality, enhanced reality and attenuated reality modes can be a more subtle intervention between out senses and the world.

A detailed exploration of the relationship between human cognition and information technology is necessary for a critical assessment of the ethical and social impacts of information technology use. It may be unwise to accept some technology unthinkingly simply because it makes various tasks easier. We might be losing skills that are valuable for our quality of life. At least we should be aware of the social and personal costs involved.

AUTHOR
Matthew Warren

ABSTRACT

In the contemporary world, the latter interpretation is by far the more common (although persons belonging to the former category of hacker would seek to more accurately define the latter group, particularly those with a malicious intent, as ‘crackers’). Hackers are by no means a new threat and have routinely featured in news stories during the last two decades. Indeed, they have become the traditional ‘target’ of the media, with the standard approach being to present the image of either a ‘teenage whiz kid’ or an insidious threat. In reality, it can be argued that there are different degrees of the problem.

Donn Parker (Parker, 1976) highlighted that the individuals involved in computer crime in the 1960’s and 1970’s were employed as key punch operators or clerks in EDP organisation s and the crimes were crimes of opportunity. In the 1980’s with the development of cheaper home microcomputers and modems, a new generation of younger computer users emerged. One of the features of this younger group was a keen interest in the technologies that lead to the development of hackers.

Steven Levy’s book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Levy, 1984) suggests that hackers operate by a code of Ethics. This code defines main key areas:

• Hands On Imperative: Access to computers and hardware should be complete and total. It is asserted to be a categorical imperative to remove any barriers between people and the use and understanding of any technology, no matter how large, complex, dangerous, labyrinthine, proprietary, or powerful.
• “Information Wants to Be Free”: can be interpreted in a number of ways. Free might mean without restrictions (freedom of movement = no censorship), without control (freedom of change/evolution = no ownership or authorship, no intellectual property), or without monetary value (no cost.)
• Mistrust Authority: Promote decentralisation. This element of the ethic shows its strong anarchistic, individualistic, and libertarian nature. Hackers have shown distrust toward large institutions, including, but not limited to, the State, corporations, and computer administrative bureaucracies.
• No Bogus Criteria: Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not by ‘bogus criteria’ such as race, age, sex, or position.
• “You can create truth and beauty on a computer.” Hacking is equated with artistry and creativity. Furthermore, this element of the ethos raises it to the level of philosophy.
• Computers can change your life for the better. In some ways, this last statement really is simply a corollary of the previous one. Since most of humanity desires things that are good, true, and/or beautiful.

During the 80’s and 90’s this pure vision of what hackers are was changed by the development of new groups within various aims and values. Mizrach (1997) states that the following individuals currently exist in cyber space:

• Hackers (Crackers, system intruders) – These are people who attempt to penetrate security systems on remote computers. This is the new sense of the term, whereas the old sense of the term simply referred to a person who was capable of creating hacks, or elegant, unusual, and unexpected uses of technology.
• Phreaks (Phone Phreakers, Blue Boxers) – These are people who attempt to use technology to explore and/or control the telephone system.
• Virus writers (also, creators of Trojans, worms, logic bombs) – These are people who write code which attempts to a) reproduce itself on other systems without authorisation and b) often has a side effect, whether that be to display a message, play a prank, or destroy a hard drive.
• Pirates – Originally, this involved breaking copy protection on software. This activity was called ‘cracking’. Nowadays, few software vendors use copy protection, but there are still various minor measures used to prevent the unauthorised duplication of software. Pirates devote themselves to thwarting these and sharing commercial software freely.
• Cypherpunks (cryptoanarchists) – Cypherpunks freely distribute the tools and methods for making use of strong encryption, which is basically unbreakable except by massive supercomputers. Because American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, such as the NSA and FBI, cannot break strong encryption, programs that employ it are classified as munitions. Thus, distribution of algorithms that make use of it is a felony
• Anarchists – are committed to distributing illegal (or at least morally suspect) information, including, but not limited to, data on bomb making, lock picking, pornography, drug manufacturing, and radio, cable and satellite TV piracy.
• Cyberpunk – usually some combination of the above, plus interest in technological self-modification, science fiction and interest in hardware hacking and ‘street tech’.

But what about the hacking situation in the 2000’s. Professor Warren will discuss a new hacking sub groups that exist. This group are “Hacker Taggers”, these hackers deface web-sites with the sole intention of leaving a “Hacker Tagger or calling card” behind. This “tag” is updated against their score and their score is updated in their hacking competition. These hackers are focused on hacking as a competition and who will be the winner. The media has often mis-reported these activities as mass hacking or cyber terrorism. The presentation will focus upon the ethical views of this new hacking sub group and the impact that they have caused and the particular issues that this sub-group poses.

REFERENCES

Levy, S (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Penguiun, ISBN 0385312105.

Mizrach S (1997) Is there a Hacker Ethic for 90s Hackers? URL:

AUTHOR
Richard Volkman

ABSTRACT

Freeculture.org asserts, “A free culture is one where all members are free to participate in its transmission and evolution, without artificial limits on who can participate or in what way.” I argue that this worthwhile goal is inconsistent with the wholesale rejection of intellectual property. While current legal justifications and implementations of intellectual property are antagonistic to free culture, an examination of the general purpose and justification of property—especially drawing from the work of John Locke and F.A. Hayek—reveals that one cannot enjoy a fully free culture without legal protections that permit authors to set the terms for the distribution and reproduction of their works.

To understand why intellectual property is a necessary condition of free culture, one must understand markets as more than merely economic institutions. Despite the explicitly consequentialist justifications usually trotted out for intellectual property, our intuitions about property are not all accounted for in narrowly economic terms, and economic terms are never the end of the story in any case. As Hayek aptly notes, “Economic considerations are merely those by which we reconcile and adjust our different purposes, none of which, in the last resort, are economic.” To get to the bottom of property, we need to investigate the relationship between property and the projects and purposes that constitute our very lives.

These considerations indicate the value of establishing institutions that provide individuals with the incentives and the means to access, process, and respond to information about the best ways to achieve their various ends. In a nutshell, assignment of property rights is necessary for a flourishing market, and a market provides the institutional means for leveraging the massive amounts of implicit, tacit, and distributed information necessary for discovering and living the good life. In this light, the purpose of property rights is for setting up and regulating the market as an information processing system that processes and distributes the information relevant to our ability to “reconcile and adjust our different purposes.”

In light of this, the critique of intellectual property typically errors by only addressing narrowly economic concerns. Against standard utilitarian defenses of intellectual property, it is often pointed out that information artifacts are non-rival goods and their distribution costs have become negligible. For example, since your having a copy of my song in no way diminishes my ability to use that song, and since nowadays there is little or no need to provide incentives to middle-men to distribute or produce the song, there are no overall negative consequences to doing away with the current financial incentives offered by intellectual property. Assuming that artists do not require strong economic incentives to do their best work, providing consumers with the legal right to make unauthorized copies does no harm to the art and no injustice to artists. In the information age, there is no need to create artificial incentives for distributors either. If the incentives of markets ever made sense, the information age has rendered them superfluous or even detrimental. After all, attention to the marketability of a work can negatively impact the work.

However, it is precisely the impact of the market on the work itself that means a fully free culture needs intellectual property. This is obscured in the critique, which narrowly addresses itself to economic incentives, missing the much more important role that markets play in gathering, processing, and distributing information in a readily usable and unequivocal form. In this sense, a market is an information resource for artists and patrons alike. The sort of market created by the assignment of intellectual property rights does a tolerably good job of gathering, processing, and making available usable feedback from an artists’ target audience. While alternative mechanisms may have a role to play, there is an undeniable advantage to a system that requires the would-be critic to “put your money where your mouth is.” Moreover, it should be emphasized that, since the relevant sense of a market is not limited to economic buying and selling of artifacts, but extends to evaluating ways of life through all sorts of distributed institutions for distilling the “wisdom of crowds,” the relevant feedback is by no means crassly or narrowly economic. Whatever market or market-like mechanisms one chooses for feedback, I will show that they can only operate on the assumption of various intellectual property rights—though unpacking those rights also vindicates the need for significant reform.

Surely there will be artists who prefer to eschew any such a feedback device, even while others embrace it, but that is exactly the point. Creators need the freedom to judge for themselves the best mechanisms of evaluation. A Lockean account of intellectual property rights is uniquely suited to defending such freedom, permitting and even encouraging alternatives to economic markets alongside other institutions. If music that is “free as in beer” really is as good or better than music owned and distributed under a reformed intellectual property regime, then we need a market to provide the feedback that proves this. Just as a Lockean account is consistent with advocacy of Open Source software, along with the recognition that some software is better when it is proprietary (a point repeatedly made by Open Source advocate Eric Raymond), so too is a Lockean account consistent with allowing artists maximum flexibility to determine the appropriate feedback and distribution networks for their creations. While intellectual property protections may have restricted artists’ choices in the broadcast age, in the information age it is more restrictive to eliminate such protections for those who desire them. Surely it would be a grave mistake to trade away, in the interests of a “free culture,” the very institutions that facilitate the freedom of artists to create as they see fit and under conditions of their own choosing.