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

Peter Dordal, Loyola University CS Dept

Wednesdays 4:15-6:45
New room: 25EP room 601

Text: The textbook will be CyberEthics, by Halbert & Ingulli, Thompson-West, 2005.


Spring 2025:
I am generally in my office on Mondays from 10:00 to noon, and from 1:45 to 3:45.
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 Wednesday, May 2, at our usual time.

The midterm will be a takehome essay-question format and you will have from Wednesday March 14 to Saturday March 17. You are to give ~1-page answers to five of the seven questions.

The midterm is here.

The final will be in-class, held during the usual time on May 2. The format will be mostly-factual short-answer questions. Here is a study guide.

My general course groundrules are here. Loyola's academic integrity rules are here.

Notes and Readings

Paper topics

Paper 1: academic website creation, due: Friday, Feb 9 (email or blackboard)

Paper 2: privacy, due Friday, Mar 2 (email or blackboard).

Paper 3: software patents, due Friday, April 13 (email or blackboard).

Paper 4: software licensing/trust, due Friday, May 4 (email or blackboard). (Assignment was updated April 25; original version is here.)

In Spring 2007 we will consider some of the topics listed below.

Here's a more Spring-2007-specific list of these topics.

Articles, references, and links

Week 1

Bart Simpson and "Fat Tony" d'Amico discuss relative right and wrong, text

Week 4 or so

An article by Charles C Mann, quoted on p 27 of H&I as saying "who will curl up with a computer in bed?", on the [possibly] imminent end of the music biz.

David Touretzky's DeCSS Gallery. He's got other great stuff on DMCA as well.

Week 6

Here is the link to the RFID papers, from above.

For those who claim "charts" are inherently factual rather than creative, here is the ultimate counterexample (due to Minard).

Week 7

Here is Andrew Odlyzko's paper Privacy, Economics, and Price Discrimination on the Internet. Price discrimination is when you charge different buyers different prices for more or less the same product, based on one buyer's willingness to pay more.

Week 8

Here is the FindLaw article by John W Dean on the Batzel v Cremers case.

Week 9

Some articles on software patents:

Week 10

Here's my summary of the Batzel v Cremers and Nuremberg Files (PP v ACLA) cases.

Week 11

More patent sites:

From an anti-European-software-patent group, a list of bad patents. Some are dreadful.

Yahoo page on Government:Law:Intellectual Property:Patents -- A collection of patent articles.

Week 13

Here's a cute story about UCITA, and the consequences if UCITA product liability applied to other things.
Speaking of UCITA, the Microsoft .net EULA no longer has a gag rule (formerly you were required to get MS permission to publish benchmarks).

Here are some links pertaining to jurisdiction (formerly above):
Aalberts, et al, The Threat of Long-Arm Jurisdiction to Electronic Commerce, 1998
Wikipedia: Internet Jurisdiction

Week 14

Here's Richard Stallman's essay, Can you trust your computer?.
Here's something on browser plugins and security.
Here's the Felten video on Diebold voting machines, with papers too.

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.