AUTHOR
Mike Bowern

ABSTRACT

Electronic democracy is one of a number of terms which Michael Saward refers to as ‘prefix-democracy’, many of which are used in the academic literature. The purpose of the prefix is to define and describe a particular subset of the vast array of democratic theories and ideas.

In this paper I use an interpretation of democracy based on its literal meaning of ‘rule by the people’. In this interpretation, therefore, representative democracy is an oxymoron, and direct democracy a tautology. Industrial or corporate democracy are terms indicating specific areas where some theory of democracy might be applied, for example in the workplace or in a business. Prefixes, such as participatory, deliberative, and discursive, describe specific activities in a democratic system.

The term Electronic (or e-, cyber, digital, etc) democracy falls into its own separate category. The definitions of these terms typically include reference to the use of ICT in democratic processes, sometimes focussing on voting, for example electronic voting. Often there are specific references to the internet, and in these definitions they frequently imply on-line participation by citizens in their democracy.

I believe that electronic democracy has a tendency to focus on the ‘electronic’, rather than on ‘democracy’. For example, there is on-going debate about the problems of electronic voting machines, but there is little focus on the problems that electronic voting is trying to solve. We should be identifying ways to use ICT to improve democratic processes, that is to enable ‘rule by the people’ to be fulfilled. This paper proposes such an improvement, using an example from Australia.

Australia operates under a Constitution which defines the powers of the federal Parliament. The Constitution was voted for by Australian citizens, and it can only be changed by the people, through a national referendum. The Australian Constitution gives the Parliament the power to make and amend laws in specified areas. Some of these laws provide the rules for the administration and operation of the Australian democratic system, for example who is allowed to vote, and how elections are to be conducted. However, there are no democratic processes to enable citizens to comment on these electoral laws, or to give their consent to them.

This means that the elected members of parliament set the rules about how they are to be elected, and it is quite possible for this power to be abused. For example, as happened in Australia in 2006, the electoral act could be amended to close the electoral roll on the day an election is called, rather than waiting at least a week before closing it. This would result in a substantial number of citizens, particularly young people, being disenfranchised, because they could not get on the roll. The outcome of this could be to reduce the votes for one political party, thus benefiting another.

The objective of this paper is to describe a method, which includes the use of ICT, to curtail abuse of power by elected representatives, through the participation of citizens in setting the rules for running their democracy. This will be a democratic way to enable citizens to have more control over their representatives, and more participation in the decision procedures of their society.

In his paper Enacting Democracy, Saward argues that a different view of democratic theory is required, one which takes advantage of some of the ideas behind the wide range of models and theories of democracy. He proposes an approach, which draws on much of the previous work on democratic theory, to develop ‘binding collective decision-making procedures’. A collective decision-making process would comprise certain stages, namely: agenda setting; debate and discussion; the moment of decision itself; and the moment of implementation.

Each of these stages draw on what Saward calls devices, which are inherent in the various models and theories of democracy. A ‘device is a mechanism that plays a part in constituting a more or less formal procedure by which binding collective decisions are reached for a political community’. Saward gives a number of examples of devices, related to systems of representation and methods of voting; deliberation and other ways for participation; and methods of implementation and review of the decision. Some of these devices are well known and established, such as elections for representatives, and voting. Other devices, such as protected public spaces of civil freedom, and the need for pause or delay in the procedure, are less familiar.

Multiple devices are sequenced in a decision procedure, using the stages identified above, ‘so as to evoke and enact democratic principles’. Saward nominates four principles which are often invoked as being fundamental to democracy, namely: political equality; inclusion; expressive freedom; and transparency.

Saward’s approach provides a framework within which a specific decision procedure can be developed, to address a specific problem, such as government abuse of power; or an innovation, such as a citizens’ initiative for greater political equality.

In Saward’s paper there is no mention of technology, which is not to imply that ict does not have a role to play in new decision procedures. His focus is on the procedure itself, and the need to include democratic principles. When these are understood and defined for a particular issue, then the role of ict can be defined.

This paper applies saward’s method to the specification of a decision procedure to enable citizens to have a say in the legislation which defines their democracy. It identifies the issues to be addressed, the devices used in the various stages to implement this decision procedure, and the role that ICT might have in these devices, particularly to ensure that the four democratic principles are followed.

AUTHOR
Maria Canellopoulou-Bottis

ABSTRACT

Public awareness has been an objective for governments and all kinds of lobbies for a great number of issues such as environmental protection and the fight against AIDS.

Public awareness means attitudes, behaviors, opinions and activities that comprise the relations between the general public or lay society as a whole to a patricular matter of wider signifinace. Public awareness does not have a legal nature and a lawyer is not any more qualified position than another professional to explore public awareness and certainly not more than a professional specialized in for example, public relations and communication. Still, a copyright lawyer should know what copyright is about and moreover, what copyright is for lay people-she should also have an idea of what changes (legal and, secondly, other) are necessary to promote public awareness of copyrights.

We seem to live in a very anti-copryight age, an age where we can speak with relative accuracy about a movement against intellectual property in general, and against intellectual property as a very idea. The scholars who attack intellectual property do not question it only when it comes to the Internet; they explore the fundamental question of the necessity or justice of intellectual property in general. And these scholars are not few, nor are they insignificant, and their arguments, that very often reach deep into constitutional and more specifically, human rights issues, are certainly not to be ignored. At least definately not when one aims at copyright public awareness. Although some people have become more involved with reading these arguments, or exploring works such as Lessig’s book Code and other Laws of Cyberspace, or become more sensitive to how intellectual property jas impacted the public domain, the majority of people who respond, do so because the arguments presented are sometimes powerful and true. If we want lay people to listen to copyright lawyers, there must be a concrete legal response to these arguments.

Techniques’ of raising public awareness about any issue are not new or unknown to professionals exactly in this matter. One could safely propose, for example, to a country suffering from acute intellectual property breaches (say, constant counterfeiting, importing of fake goods, digital content illegal copying e.tc.-and these countries are many) the following measures:

• to organize copyright public awareness weeks. For example, the US Copyright Office has organized a Copyright Awareness Week (March 6-10, 2007)
• to use easy little books for childern about copyrights. An example of this is the UNESCO’s book for children, titled ‘the Imaginative Professions’
• to use copyright awareness posters in public places, such as, for example, the Mafalda cartoons posted on the public transport netwrok of Bogota in 2005
• to intorduce seminars in schools about copyright protection, its foundations and basic rules
• to engage in a series of press releases, feature stories and interviews published in the local media, like the Jordan government promoted
• to support with grants special University Intellectual Property chairs and introducing intellectual property in the law schools curricula, possibly as a mandatory subject
• to organize in schools the showing of films showing how artists work, how music is produced, how drugs are researched and manufactured, and other techniques.

Before starting a project like the above, perhaps it is wise to check whether similar projects had any significant success in the past. This is crucial, because, among other reasons, large amounts of resources are necessary to complete this sort of projects. Again, specialized professionals are equipped with the scientific tools to measure whether and to what extent copyright public awareness projects did suceed in their objectives.

Informing about illegality of copying and achieving this kind of knowledge is not enough for a campaign to be successful. A very interesting note in a Hong Kong evaluation of a copyright public awareness campaign was that the percentage of people knowing, after the project, that this file-sharing is illegal, augmented, but simultaneously, the percentage of people who continued to engage in this type of illegal file-sharing also increased (from 3.5 percent in 2004 to 6.8 percent in 2005).

Success has not been evidenced, when it came to copyright acceptance by people. Such success could be detected if, for example, people tended to lessen their illegal copying of protected material from the Internet. This could be an expected result, especially after the widely-publicised cases against individuals, such as the case against Jesse Jordan, a student, by the Recording Industry Association of America, for constructing and uploading a search engine which allowed, among other funtions, the unauthorized sharing of musical files and of course, the famous Napster case.

The rule, however, as it seems today remains that piracy (unauthorized use and consumer distribution) is the de facto social norm for approximately 50 per cent of the populations targeted in special surveys. Simultaneously, there seems to be, indeed, a message inconsistency to the consumers: opposite tendancies towards both copyright protection and, also, towards a more open and free access to works and information.

It is also very interesting to explore the question of copyright’s public awareness through the various ‘glasses’ of the various philosophical and legal theories behind copyright protection. This brings us to what I think is the heart of the matter: why do we have intellectual property rights? One must have a decent answer to offer to laypeople, when one asks them to refrain from unbeatable temptations, such as buying an illegal CD copy from a man in the street, or illegally downloading the latest movie with their computer.

What is proposed to remedy the copyright awareness/acceptance problem? Is it true that words in IP discourse such as ‘rightholders’ should be replaced by ‘painters, sculptors, musicians, writers’ and ‘copyright industries’ with ‘copyright-based industries’?

More correct is, though, to try and fight the reason behind the ‘piratical’ behavior, which necessitates the substantial promotion of balanced approaches to intellectual property rights. The paper will present a series of recommendations to achieve this balance.

AUTHOR
Thomas Blake, Bernd Carsten Stahl and N.B. Fairweather

ABSTRACT

Artificial agents, from unembodied web bots to robots, are becoming a real part of our world. In time, we may be able to create beings with human-level intelligence. As with any agent that can act upon the world, we should expect such beings to act well. But how can we expect good behavior from such an alien being? The Singularity Institute has proposed the concept of “friendly AI” to answer this question. I will show that their analysis of the issue is insufficient and propose another approach to creating ethical intelligent artificial agents.

The Singularity Institute wrote Creating Friendly AI (CFAI) based on the concepts from General Intelligence and Seed AI (GISAI). The goal of GISAI was to describe, in the abstract, how to create an artificial general intelligence, bearing in mind the failures of past attempts at AI. In general, the method adopted by GISAI was to create a “seed AI”, a mind which may not have human intelligence but instead has the ability to improve itself. Such an AI would be able to gradually reach human intelligence (and better-than-human intelligence) by way of small self-improvements.

CFAI is an attempt to determine how to ensure that a seed AI treats us well. According to the Singularity Institute, there is little reason for us to assume that an AI would share our values and goals. Our values and goals come largely from our evolutionary history, and a being that does not share that history should not be expected to share those goals. CFAI suggests that engineers who create AI should attempt to imbue them with ethics.

CFAI advocates making “friendly” AI, beings whose goals and values include, for instance, being sympathetic towards humanity. However, this approach will not work either. An AI that can change its own programming might pursue some of its goals and values by changing others. If this is truly an alien being, then many of its goals and values might conflict with artificially inserted directives like “feel sympathetic towards humanity”. When this happens, the goals which do not mesh with the AI’s nature are likely to be the first to go.

As I have argued elsewhere, ones values come from ones nature. If Robby the Robot has a nature that is alien to us, we should not expect what is good for Robby to be good for us. If we want Robby to behave “ethically”, that is to behave in a way that would be good for a human, then we must ensure that Robby’s nature necessitates an ethics that is in line with ours. If we want Robby to respect and protect humans, then Robby should be a social being that we treat as an equal.

It follows that we should attempt to create artificial agents with a nature similar to ours. Then, an ethics like ours would follow from its nature, and the artificial agent should have no more trouble being good than we do. Of course, this is no guarantee that our creations will be good, but we shouldn’t expect more of ourselves than we do of God.

REFERENCES

Blake, Thomas. “Technological Transcendence: Why It’s Okay that the Future Doesn’t Need Us”. Proceedings of ETHICOMP2007, Tokyo, Japan.

Singularity Institute (orig. Eliezer Yudkowsky). “Creating Friendly AI”. online at http://www.singinst.org/upload/CFAI/

Singularity Institute (orig. Eliezer Yudkowsky). “General Intelligence and Seed AI”. online at http://www.singinst.org/ourresearch/publications/GISAI/

AUTHOR
Barbara Begier

ABSTRACT

Users’ involvement in a software process is recommended to respect ethical and social values and to provide software quality from the user’s point of view. The questionnaire survey is reported ? its aim was to get learn what threats associated with an informatization on a large scale are pointed out by students of an engineering faculty. Many of threats may be eliminated by user’s involvement in a software process. Just agile methodologies help respecting social values and producing software products adapted to users’ expectations. Several additional primary and supporting processes are required in a software life cycle focused on a cooperation with users. Software product assessment ensures an external feedback from users.

There is still a challenge to balance agility and discipline. The dominating process-oriented hard methodologies were born in a military context. Quality is there related to rigorous plans and detailed definitions of processes. But the introduced procedures, including those recommended in the CMMI, do not guarantee quality of the product. Software developers usually act in an isolation from software users. Involved experts try to show their own usefulness and recommend new procedures and metrics. Hard methodologies are reported as successful in armaments production, aircraft industry (Boeing, Lockheed Martin) and in the branch of computing and telecommunication (Motorola), all counted to the military area ? in the conference SEPG (Software Engineering Process Group) in 2005 the armament sector was represented also by: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Motorola, Siemens. Unfortunately, hard methodologies often fail in software production for social applications.

The reported questionnaire survey shows various threats associated with an informatization on a large scale. The questionnaire items were divided into three groups related to the individual, country-wide, and global threats. The obtained results are presented in three tables attached to the conference paper. In engineering students’ opinions the health condition of individuals spending all day long at the computer screen seems to be the most threatened item in the respondents’ opinion. Lack of privacy including lack of human control concerning data security in information systems holds a leading position among threats on the country-wide and on the global scale.

One of strategies to improve software quality is to provide a continual feedback from users on a software product, especially an expert system and that produced by making use of public funds. The required feedback should not be limited to specify requirements. Users’ involvement is one of principles shared in agile approaches, in response to bureaucratic and unsuccessful methods in software production. Agile methodologies are product-oriented and seem to be the emerging ones. Several methodologies have been developed to encourage software community to customer-developer collaboration, to combine humans and technology, and to prepare participants for collaboration. An assumption underlying any agile methodology concerns granularity of a software product ? it determines small iterations in software development.

The author’s research shows that a cooperation with users may have, at least, the form of a software product assessment by a wide spectrum of its users. An instrument to assess software quality and provide an external loop of the required feedback is a questionnaire survey of at least several dozen of users. Required software improvements are specified on the base of an analysis of the obtained results. Several experiments with software quality assessment by their direct users have been performed and reported. Besides an external loop of the feedback there are also several internal loops provided in each development cycle by an active involvement of users’ representatives in various working teams, meetings, brain storm sessions, test design and supervision, software inspections (where users play roles of coauthors of control lists of software inspections), etc.

Agile methodologies should be promoted among software developers. The main idea emphasized here is to make users the subject of a software process to build high quality software products. A cooperation with users helps to consider ethical and social aspects of software applications and makes possible to learn users’ point of view and to improve a product according to users’ notes and expectations. The objectives of the software process in such approach are listed in the conference paper. The desired user’s high satisfaction from a product means that all realized processes are in fact (not declaratively only) focused on that goal. Conventional phases in software development no longer make sense. Several additional processes and also additional phases in a software life cycle are introduced to provide the required continual feedback from users. Agile methodologies and ethical aspects in computing need a special attention and should be incorporated in an educational process of future software engineers.

AUTHOR
Porfirio Barroso, Lucía Tello and Adelaide Marin

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this investigation, focuses on the different concepts of plagiarism that we use now and have been using trough history, starting from its etymologic origin to the new concepts plagiarism stand for with the arrival of personal computers and Internet. We intend to show how plagiarism has lived among men/women ever since its existence, even though her evolution is logic, this phenomenon kept its essentialities of the act. Trough this thesis we will make a comparison of plagiarism since ancient times up till the influences of New Information and Communication Technologies.

The purpose is to create, in the mind of the receptor, criteria’s of free opinion about how plagiarism exposes the principal arguments in favor and against this phenomenon. On the other hand, we would like to give acknowledgement about how plagiarism handles in different scopes like the artistically, architectural, literature, and to distinguish from this century, the technological and informational scope.

The conceptual study is being developed from a chronological point of view: plagiarism trough time. We put the different forms forward in which plagiarism transformed itself since the assumed religious origins of the ancient epoch, trough the scientific improvements of Modern Times, to end with the new technological discoveries that preoccupy the present.

An analysis of the concept mentioned above, is also carried out from a legal, doctrinal and ethical point of view, which is the balance on which this investigation is based. The terminology plagiarism can consist of two meanings that have been used and are still used in history. The first meaning refers to the fraudulent copy without authors’ rights. The second meaning of plagiarism is used in a lot of publications as a synonym for the abduction of people.

The different mediums, in digital or printed format, that have been sources to obtain information for this investigation, were in principal social theses written by authors such as Virgilio Balbuena; laws and directives of the European Union, such as the Treaty of OMPI about authors’ rights (WCT) and the Convention of Berna for the protection of Literary and Artistic Works. The different examples used in the investigation are part of the collective cultural memory. After the analysis and examination of these sources, it was concluded that plagiarism lasts until the end of humanity . It was shown that this phenomenon is typical for human beings, in religious aspects (God created man to his image and resemblance), as well as in physiological and scientific aspects (DNA that duplicates, plagiarizes itself to reproduce mankind). Moreover, learning by imitation is also a point of discussion. In this case, plagiarism is the main instrument for man to develop his cognitive capabilities.

Human beings have learned to live with plagiarism, knowing how to distinguish the good or bad behavior in daily and professional life. We can discern between legal an ethical aspects of the plagiarism. From the point of view of law, each country has its own regulation about the plagiarism. However, from the point of view of Ethics, according to the Internet Codes of Ethics, we have consulted, all kind of plagiarism is unethical. On the other hand, we undestand that mere copying is when the authors give permission for copying, or is an authorized copy.

There are a lot of arguments for and against this phenomenon. The detractors of plagiarism refer to fraudulent copies that work against public interest and fundamental rights by misleading the consumer in the displacement of the pieces of work and their authors, losing the spirit and originality of the first creator. From another point of view, the defenders of plagiarism proclaim that the copy is their own possession. This is how they acquire the status of martyr by reducing their own originality and to accept the responsibility to have internalized the essence of the work. This duality forms an obstacle to create laws and regularization, because this concept includes morality and ethical issues.

Despite the foundation of acts like copyright and domestic rules from the European Union like intellectual property and author rights, plagiarism is still one of the most international problem for the new technology. Since the foundation of the printing till the recent new computers unlimited forms of plagiarism exist. Nowadays not controlling plagiarism has great consequences in sectors like economy, art and information. The main cause: Internet.

The limitations that makes the investigation process impossible have a mainly literal and legislative character. There is a legal blank as well in the communitarian law as in the laws of the government and those laws that are only capable of being effective to prevent plagiarism. There is also little investigation in this phenomenon, that is why there is not many literature about it. The texts that handles about the subject abuse the general opinion and don’t give good arguments to start an objective investigation. The sense of this text is established in the fact about whether it is the original work or not like a similar investigation. It is a copy of different consulted sources. In this case the reader already knows how plagiarism is produced because he knows the source. And like this, they found themselves obligated to take part of one of the positions already bared.

The examined work presents itself as a text that analyses different relation subjects like History, Humanity, Ethics and plagiarism.

AUTHOR
Giampaolo Azzoni

ABSTRACT

In order to develop the civil and economic potential of social media, not only operators, but also governments and international institutions, should operate towards the construction of a blogosphere conceived as a spontaneous order (in the sense of Hayek), an open society (in the sense of Popper) and a plural space of public opinion (in the sense of Habermas). Social effectiveness of a social medium is narrowly linked to the capacity to abandon a monologic and narcissistic dimension and attain a dialogical and relational form. Social media operators (especially professional operators) are invited to elaborate not only codes of conduct, but even structures of social media from a point of view which is inter-subjective, dialectic and ethically engaged (in the sense of Hegel).