Computer Ethics, Fall 2022

Mondays 4:15-6:45

Class 13

Dec 5

Readings

Read the parts of Chapter 4 of Baase on patents
Read Chapter 5 of Baase on Crime



Musk revelations of the Hunter Biden Laptop case.

Musk revealed Twitter documents over the weekend describing the incident. There was not a lot new. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy.

Three weeks before the 2020 election, a story appeared about Hunter Biden's unclaimed laptop, and some possibly incriminating emails.

Twitter shut the story down, on the theory that the laptop had been "hacked", and they have a policy against that. The laptop, if real, was hacked in the sense that Biden did not consent to its access. Still, this was just a little after Trump's tax returns had been leaked, so the "hacked" policy seemed somewhat unevenly applied.

The emails do not appear to be terribly incriminating. Some of them have provider-supplied email signatures that prove their authenticity, but it is impossible to establish the veracity of the majority of them.

Twitter also shut down the account of the New York Post for over two weeks, and that of the Trump presidential campaign for one day.

Amazon

An interesting tale of unethical behavior on Amazon. Amazon clearly tolerates this, but it is not clear whether they have done anything else wrong, or whether this has any connection to whether Amazon's own behavior is anticompetitive.

https://medium.com/@david073/7-million-dollar-amazon-bankrupt-cf977fb085f5


Debates


KSR v Teleflex

Mayo Labs v Prometheus Labs, Myriad Genetics

Abstract patents

    Ultramercial

    Alice

Lawsuit Venue

Crime:

    So what is hacking? Unauthorized access? Harm? Bypassing a technological access measure?

    felonies