References

Course Materials

Definition of IP

Useful, concise definition.

Previous version of this course

Dr. Peter Dordal's fall 2005 version of this course.

Deontological versus utilitarian approaches to ethics

A brief summary with examples.

Deontological, Teleological and Virtue Ethics

Comparison of three normative ethical systems.

Slashdot discussion on DRM

Community discussion on various aspects of DRM.

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.

IEEE Portal

Section on ethics. See also the IEEE 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.

Indices

Yahoo page on Government:Law:Intellectual Property:Patents

Find out how huge corporations want to interfere with software innovation through the mechanism of patent law.