Computer Ethics, Spr 2016
Class 11
Week 10 Readings
You should read Chapter 3 of Baase, on Speech
Debates
Feinstein-Burr draft anti-crypto bill is now released.
The devil is in the interpretation. Clearly the bill is designed to force
Apple, if faced with a similar situation in the future, to provide
assistance to the FBI.
But Apple still has First Amendment grounds for refusal (though they might
not win on that).
Apple could also argue that they are exempt because the phone owners
are the ones doing the encryption. The bill states "Covered entities are
responsible only for the information or data that they (or another party on
their behalf) have made unintelligible"; Apple may argue that this language
applies only to encrypted communications where they are one of the parties.
In the San Bernardino case, they were not.
Finally, it is not clear the bill bans strong encryption. With the emphasis
on not clear.
Patents
Parker v Flook
The Diehr decision|
Some software-patent examples
Sofware-patent issues
Heckel paper
Eolas
i4i
NTP
E-data