Pc Ethics - Basic Classes

In this lesson you will learn:

What Are Ethics And Why Are they Needed?

Ethics deals with the principals or right and wrong- the moral conduct governing a society or profession. The dramatically increasing use of PC's at work and home has given rise to a number of ethical issues that every PC user will have to eventually face. These issues include the honoring of software licenses, the protection of publicly available hardware and software resources, and a respect for the personal privacy of individuals.

Safeguard Your Work

The protections of the law are there to protect your intellectual rights. Data loss and theft are covered in later classes.

Software Licensing Agreements

there are some important new twists in the definition of intellectual property rights you should be aware of. In the world of printed matter, a copyright protects the author by clearly stating the illegality of making unauthorized copies of a book or printed article. Most countries honor the authorship and most governments grant formal copyrights to authors and the publishers, and violators end up in court. Most settlements involve money and lots of payback time; not a quick time in jail. Lawyers are experts at making your 'free' life financially miserable for years to come.

The computer equivalent of the printed material is now the disks and CD/DVD media. In the early days of yore, software authors took elaborate pains to copy-protect the contents of the published disks. A user was often restricted to making a single copy for backup, and after the copy was made, a protect mechanism inside the software would prevent the disk from making additional copies, or sometimes render the software unusable. That created a number of serious problems for users and by the early '80s most software producers abandon their efforts to protect software by copy protection time bombs. Instead, they relied on software licensing agreements.

PC Users soon learned how fantastically easy it is to copy software from disk to disk. It is much easier to copy software than it is to steal pages from a book by standing over a copy machine for hours on end. Unauthorized copying of commercial software to media for distribution violates the author's rights and copyright law and is illegal throughout a growing area of the world. The software licensing agreements clearly state the terms of use and the limits of distribution and ownership restrictions. Your entire use of the software is totally contingent on those terms! Exact wording varies.

Shareware and Freeware

Shareware is software that you are allowed to try out for a period of time before making a purchase decision. It is not freeware! there is a lot of useful shareware available in different sites that specialize in distributing software. Download.com, CNET.com etc. specializes in making these available to try out. Some are written as a thesis for a degree, others are from software distribution and marketing departments of major corporations making the public aware of their product that fills a specific need or market niche. Trial use licenses govern the use of the software during the specified trial period only.

Honoring End User Licensing Agreements (EULA)

Although the legal ramifications for violating the EulA are strict, the fact is that few are actually enforced, detected or prosecuted. You might be asking yourself why you should pay top dollar for a commercial product that is available to you for free. Why shouldn't you just help a friend out by copying something he needs that you have gotten the same way? this practice has a term: Software Piracy.

As a software pirate, you bump into something called ETHICS. While thousands of hours go into developing something that is of little financial worth to you, purchasing and paying for the software development services rendered to you is the only way that the true author can be compensated. When you give a book to a friend, you don't usually go to the trouble of keeping a copy for yourself, so the value of having the book is unique, being read by one person at a time. Because software is so easy to copy, but difficult to create, it is very tempting to pass on copies to friends or fail to compensate the creator for hours, days and months of work that you enjoy for nothing. This is a direct violation of ethics, and in doing so, you are seriously violating the authors' intellectual property rights under any court of law in the US and almost anywhere else in the world. It is wrong!

Registering software is the modern way for authors to keep tabs on the distribution ranges as well as a link to perform other services and support when needed. This can include bug fixes, documentation and discounts on other software. Lately, fear of getting caught has come into play more and more as another factor in the reasoning behind playing it straight.

Safeguarding Software

The 'Information Super Highway' has a promise of enabling more and more users to have easier access to stronger and smarter software. Thanks in part to the use of publicly available Wide Area Networks, 3G and 5G networks, GPS, cell services and computer resources the "new internet" itself brings responsibilities as well as privileges.

Resource use on large computer networks is often controlled by login IDs and Passwords and biometrics (fingerprinting or eye / face recognition). The right to privacy is not explicitly stated in the Constitution of the United States, but in 1928 had specific rulings relating to the exact nature of what constitutes privacy in the information age. US lawmakers from both State and National levels have made numerous statutes and laws to control the massive invasion of privacy and civil/authorship rights. Since 9/11 these issues have been brought before courts on every level throughout the country and new data protection / access laws are becoming codified.

The Consequences: The Courts

Over 150 State laws in Washington have been passed, and enforcement is up dramatically as more and more lawyers get on board. The fact that software enforcement fines of up to $100,000 per instance can gain positive revenue from a source unrelated to sales is not lost to corporations that make a living off of protecting their bottom line.

Lawyers are on the prowl for these. Beware! As mentioned before, violators end up in court. Most settlements involve big money and lots of payback time; not a quick stint in jail. Lawyers are experts at making your 'free' life financially miserable for years to come.