Comp 317-001/417-001, Csed 417: Social & Legal issues in Computing

Peter Dordal, Loyola University CS Dept

Spring 2010: Tuesdays 7:00-9:30,  Corboy Law Room 206

Text: The textbook will be A Gift of Fire, 3rd Edition, by Sara Baase, Prentice-Hall, 2008. This is also available in an e-book format.

Spring 2022:
I am generally in my office on Mondays from noon to a little before 4:00.
Sometimes I have meetings or come in late, so check first.
I am also available other times via Zoom, by appointment. Contact me via email for the Zoom meeting ID.

There will be several writing assignments during the semester, plus a midterm and final. The papers will count for about half your grade; the exams will each count for about a quarter. The final is Tuesday, May 4, at our usual time and place.

My general course groundrules are here. Loyola's academic integrity rules are here; you are expected to be familiar with the rules for quoting other sources in papers.


The final exam study guide is here. The final exam will be in our usual room on Tuesday, May 4.
Here is the course survey. You have through Sunday night, May 2, to answer it.

Notes and Readings

Course notes
Week 1: Jan 19
 Week 2: Jan 26
 Week 3: Feb 2
Week 4: Feb 9
 Week 5: Feb 16
 Week 6: Feb 23
Week 7: Mar 2
 Week 8: Mar 16
 Week 9: Mar 23
Week 10: Mar 30
 Week 11: Apr 6
 Week 12: Apr 13
Week 13: Apr 20
 Week 14: Apr 27

Paper topics

Paper 1: Music sampling, due Friday, Feb 19.

Paper 2: Smartphone tracking, due Friday, April 16.

Paper 3: Patents or data protection, due Friday, May 7 (end of finals week)

We will consider some of the topics listed below.

Articles, references, and links

General

Don't Talk To Cops, Part 1, James Duane, Regent University Law School

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

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 then-new Oregon law as "theft", and Schwartz was prosecuted and convicted.