Computer Ethics, Fall 2020

Class 3 Readings

By this point you should have read all of chapter 1 and the first three sections of chapter 4.





Last class, you went into small groups to discuss the dispute between Apple and Epic Games, regarding Apple's 30% cut in the App Store.

By and large, the majority felt that Apple had a right to require that companies selling or distributing software through the App Store had to abide by Apple's rules.

How about these other two examples:

  1. Should employers be able to require that employees sign non-compete agreements, so they cannot work for a competitor for, say, two years after leaving?
  2. Should employers be able to require that employees sign agreements waiving their rights to receive a minimum wage?

In both cases, the employer is, like Apple, setting the basic groundrules. For Apple it was the App Store; here it is for employment.

During the so-called Lochner era of Supreme Court decisions (1905-1937), it is likely the court would have permitted both 1 and 2, though in 1937 they upheld a minimum-wage law.


Copyright and news

It once made sense for newspapers to expect paid subscriptions. But what should happen in light of, say, Hacker News, news.ycombinator.com? Am I really going to subscribe to all the publications that appear here? Is there some alternative? (I might have used news.google.com, but at least Google does have lots of money.)

Newspapers have been politically slanted since the dawn of the republic; Thomas Jefferson once said "nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper". But at least they got paid.

How is the press to survive in the era of sharing links to articles?

How many of you have installed a browser extension to make the use of private browsing undetectable?


Paper 1

music sampling and Fair Use or DMCA and cloud filesharing

Fair Use,

DMCA