Comp 317/417

Social, Ethical and Legal Issues in Computing

Summer 2014: Mondays and Wednesdays 6:00-9:00,  CMUN 014.

Text: The textbook will be A Gift of Fire, 4th Edition, by Sara Baase, Prentice-Hall, 2012. This is also available in an e-book format.

There will be three writing assignments during the semester; the first writing assignment will have a rewriting component, as you resubmit your first draft.

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.

Notes and Readings

Notes Organized by Topic

Readings

Paper topics

• File sharing and copyright
• Whether there is such a thing as "Intellectual Property"
• The DMCA, and what it means to you
• Software patents
• Issues in software licensing
• Trust and the web: phishing and other matters
• website management: cookies, deep linking, user tracking
• The continuing erosion of privacy, and why nobody cares
• Professional responsibilities in computing fields
• encryption and the law
• How much can you trust your software?
• Hacking
• Antitrust issues in software

Articles, references, and links

General

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.