Computer Ethics, Fall 2020, Thursdays

November 5

Class 11 Readings

By this point you should have read all of chapter 2.

You should soon begin reading Baase Chapter 3 on Speech.


The New Zealand Supreme Court has ruled that Kim Dotcom, founder of megaupload.com, can in principle be extradited to the US, although he also has the right to appeal factual issues at a lower court. See bbc.com/news/technology-54809226.

Also, Github is taking the DMCA takedown notice for youtube-dl very seriously, even though it is not a legitimate takedown.

Licra v Yahoo (and Yahoo v Licra)
    The "affects" test and jurisdiction

Google and being forgotten

Source code as speech

Patents

Pharmaceuticals

Software

It has to be a software "idea". In practice, essentially every software implementation is "straightforward". But coming up with a new idea, covering a way to do something, or a feature nobody thought of before, is harder to write off as intrinsically straightforward.

Here are the practical grounds for appealing someone else's patent

  1. Find prior art, proving someone else had the idea before the patent filing date
  2. Show that the patent is obvious by showing it is a straightforward application of a known algorithm
  3. Show that the patent is obvious by showing it is a straightforward combination of prior-art ideas
  4. Show that the patent is obvious by showing it represents doing on a computer a process that was well-known without computers (Alice)
  5. Show that the patent is "abstract" (hard, as the standard for "abstract" is not clear)

What about the XOR-mouse patent?

Crime

Hacking and the CFAA