About Ethics in Information Technology

Photo by Darren Hester (Flickr)

Every advancement in information technology is accompanied by at least one ethical quandary. From Facebook to email updates, computer users are unaware of the fine balance between ethics and profit struck by providers. Software developers, businesses and individuals must think about the rights and wrongs of using information technology every day. The fundamental issues underlying the world of information technology are the end user's expectation of privacy and the provider's ethical duty to use applications or email responsibly.

Intellectual Property and Information Technology

The merger of intellectual property rights and information technology has been rough going since the 1990s. The advent of Napster, Limewire and other peer-to-peer downloading networks brought the issue of infringing on artistic property to the fore. NBC's exclusive rights to the 2008 Olympic Games were challenged by bloggers and online pirates who placed footage on YouTube. The ethical issue that arises when dealing with intellectual property in the virtual world is the length to which content producers should pursue permission to reprint images and articles. While lifting entire articles for a term paper is clearly unacceptable, there are questions from ethicists about the practicality of seeking out unknown artists and writers for something as minor as a blog.

Read more: About Ethics in Information Technology | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/about_4743180_ethics-information-technology.html#ixzz1F1orm181

According to Dennis Thompson, Universities—and their faculty, students, and staff—have a great deal at stake in the efforts to meet the challenges posed by developments in information technology. The problems the new technology presents, as well as the opportunities it offers, implicate some of the central values of the university. Teaching and research, in their individual as well as their institutional modes, take on new forms that are forcing changes in traditional
practices and established procedures throughout the university. The question of who controls the products created by and for this new technology naturally comes to the fore, and quite properly prompts reviews of internal policies on intellectual property. But the framework of intellectual property does not adequately capture many of the serious concerns we should have about the products of information technology, and those that it does capture are more general than the preoccupation with information technology suggests.

REFERENCE: 

http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp9906.pdf