Social and Ethical Issues in Computing

In Spring 1999 we will consider some of the following current topics: Here are some relevant links.

Organizations

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.

The 2B Guide A guide to the proposed law on software transactions: Draft Uniform Commercial Code Article 2B: Software Contracts.

US Copyright office home page All sorts of information on copyright legislation, including the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.


Link farms

Yahoo page on Government:Law:Intellectual Property:Patents -- find out how huge corporations want to bleed software innovation dry through the mechanism of patent law


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

Richard Stallman on music copyrights - Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation and project gnu. He has many ideas -- some radical, some not -- on copyrights.

Copyright summary from a practicing attorney.