IT Ethics -- Annotated Bibliography
Bowie, Norman E. (2005). Digital Rights and Wrongs: Intellectual Property in the Information
Age. Business and Society Review, 110(1), 77-96.
Norman Bowie takes great pains in his peer-reviewed article to point out what is legal an what is not legal when it comes to recording / taping from television and from the Internet. In fact Bowie uses an illegal issue (downloading music from the Internet)
to present a moral issue: young people and students know it is illegal to download copyrighted music and movies, but they don't see it as immoral.
While Bowie zeros in on students and young people for their lack of morality vis-a-vis getting copyrighted music for free, his overall argument goes further than that copyright laws are justified when protecting "artistic creativity." He points to the fact that between
1999 and 2005, "...downloaders…reduced industry revenues by at least $700 million" and as many as 600,000 movie files are shared each day" on file-sharing networks
(Bowie, 88). The bottom line here is that it's certainly about money, not just morality.
Yet, Bowie's piece is aimed directly at the lack of values young people exhibit: "…As
morality becomes more demanding, students seem to be less sensitive to it" (95).
Choi, Chong Ju, Kim, Sae Won, and Yu, Shui. (2009). Global Ethics of Collective Internet
Governance: Intrinsic Motivation and Open Source Software. Journal of Business
Ethics, 90(4), 523-531.
This article continues the discussion that Bowie energized and elaborated on: the rights of privacy, the right of intellectual property and the innovation of "open source software"
(OSS) that allows people to access materials online. The authors use two theories to bring business ethics into the debate: "psychological contract" (a sense of trust within the community of software development programmers) and "intrinsic motivation" (these are experiences sought "for its own sake and as an end in itself" (Choi, 524).
After supplying existing research on the subject of OSS ("…the majority of the literature on OSS…focus[es] on the market versus [the] social and public good"), Choi's salient point is that OSS programmers could help build a bridge between the strictly economic approach to the OSS phenomenon and the "…social anthropological school of thought"
that is based on reciprocity. That having been said, more study is needed (Choi, 529).
Ess, Charles. (2009). Floridi's Philosophy of Information and Information Ethics: Current
Perspectives, Future Directions. The Information Society, 25(3), 159-168.
Is there a need for an ethical standard regarding information and computing on a global scale? Charles Ess believes there is and his article embraces the philosophy of information (PI) and of information ethics (IE) of Luciano Floridi to make his points.
Ess is impressed with the fact that Floridi's PI and IE fill a need for a global information and computing ethics (ICE) using a "naturalistic philosophy" (by combining traditional
Western philosophy with Eastern traditions such as Buddhist & Confucianism) and the Notion of "ethical pluralism" that "seeks to conjoin shared norms, value and practices"
(159).This article delves into esoteric issues; is not easily digested by lay person. The author clearly believes "pluralism" in ICE preserves and protects traditions and values that define unique cultures worldwide. But he could have discussed "shared norms" that help define and clarify Floridi in narrative that was less obscure and circular.
Goldsmith, Jack, and Wu, Tim. (2006). Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless
World (Chapter 1). New York: Oxford University Press.
In Chapter 1 the authors cover the clash between France and Yahoo; Yahoo had insisted that French judiciary had no right to tell an American ISP what content could be legally available to French users, but in time Yahoo backed down and removed Nazi
offerings (and all other offensive material) from its servers.
This chapter is very well-written, very pertinent to the recent history of the Internet and to laws affecting the Internet. Ironically, while Yahoo had stubbornly held out against
French legal threats, insisting it would not give in to censorship, Yahoo agreed to allow
China to tell it what needed censoring (including turning over to China the name of Shi
Tao, a journalist who emailed -- on Yahoo -- a democracy website in the U.S. And for that seemingly mundane act Tao was summarily thrown in prison for ten years). Yahoo's passion for profit clearly out-weighed any ethical stance regarding censorship.
Goldsmith, Jack, and Wu, Tim. (2006). Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless
World (Chapter 8). New York: Oxford University Press.
This chapter follows the trail of the original launch of eBay, which was the brainchild of Pierre Omidyar; soon after his initial success (allowing people to sell and buy online)
Omidyar...
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