Social and Ethical Issues in Computing

Comp 388-007, Comp 417-001
Tuesday, Thursday 4:15pm-5:30pm; 25EP Room 208.

In Fall 2005 we will consider some of the following current topics:

File sharing and copyright
Whether there is such a thing as "Intellectual Property"
The DMCA, and what it means to you
Software patents
Issues in software licensing
Trust and the web: phishing and other matters
The continuing erosion of privacy, and why nobody cares
Professional responsibilities in computing fields
encryption and the law
How much can you trust your software?
Hacking
Antitrust issues in software

Paper 1, due Sept 20
Paper 2, on RFID, due Oct 13.
Paper 3, on the law, due Dec 1.

Takehome midterm, to be released Sunday Oct 23 at 7:39 pm and due Thursday Oct 27 by class time. You will be given 6 questions and should answer 5 of them. Each answer might be about one page long.

Here is Andrew Odlyzko's paper Privacy, Economics, and Price Discrimination on the Internet. Price discrimination is when you charge different buyers different prices for more or less the same product, based on one buyer's willingness to pay more.

Here is Richard Stallman's paper on software patents.

Here is Simson Garfinkel's article Patently Absurd.

There will be several papers during the semester, plus a midterm and final. The midterm will be in a "takehome" essay format; the final will be in-class.

The final exam will be Thursday, December 15, at 4:15 pm (our usual class time, but longer).

Class participation is expected, although only lack of attendence is likely to impact your grade. Grading will be based 50-65% on the papers and the rest on the exams.

The textbook will be CyberEthics, by Halbert & Ingulli, Thompson-West, 2005. This will be supplemented with other readings.

My general course groundrules are here.

Week-by-week class notes will be here.

Here are some relevant links.

Organizations

Association for Computing Machinery -- The professional organization for computer professionals (oriented towards programmers). See their USACM subgroup for public-policy issues. See also the ACM Code of Ethics.

Electronic Frontier Foundation -- Founded to fight for citizens' rights in the areas of privacy, cyberspace freedom (specifically, freedom of speech), copyrights, and encryption.

American Civil Liberties Union -- Not specifically concerned with cyberspace law, but nonetheless very involved in the fight against the Communications Decency Act. The ACLU has long fought against censorship in any form, and for personal liberties in general.

Electronic Privacy Information Center -- They are concerned with both government surveillance (directly and by searching your records), the scope of government databases, and encryption.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility -- "CPSR is a public-interest alliance of computer scientists and others interested in the impact of computer technology on society." Includes privacy issues but also professional responsibilities of programmers and workplace empowerment issues.

Ethics Center for Engineering and Science A useful compendium of ethics case studies and other information pertaining to science and engineering.

US Copyright office home page All sorts of information on copyright legislation, including the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

2600, the Hacker Quarterly, leader in the fight for DeCSS.

Link farms

Yahoo page on Government:Law:Intellectual Property:Patents -- find out how huge corporations want to bleed software innovation dry through the mechanism of patent law

Individuals

Friends of Randal Schwartz -- Randal Schwartz is the author of the bestselling Perl reference book. As a consultant at Intel, he continued to perform some routine system administration duties after he was officially transferred to other tasks. These duties unfortunately were classified by a new Oregon law as "theft", and Schwartz was prosecuted and convicted.