Sustainability, Social ,legal and Ethics

Issues in Computing
Lecture : Intellectual Property
Sherif H. El-Gohary , Phd

Based on slides prepared by Cyndi Chie, Sarah Frye and Sharon Gray.
SCH 163 - Fall 2024 Fifth edition updated by Timothy Henry
What We Will Cover
❑ Principles, Laws, and Cases
❑ Responses to Copyright Infringement
❑ Search Engines and Online Libraries
❑ Free Software
❑ Patents for Inventions in Software
 Principles, Laws, and Cases
❑ What is Intellectual Property?
❑ The intangible creative work, not its particular physical form
❑ Value of intelligence and artistic work comes from creativity,
ideas, research, skills, labor, non-material efforts and
attributes the creator provides
❑ Protected by copyright and patent law
 Principles, Laws, and Cases
U.S copyright Law (Title 17 of U.S. Code) gives copyright holder
following exclusive rights:
❑ To make copies
❑ To produce derivative works, such as translations into other
languages or movies based on books
❑ To distribute copies
❑ To perform the work in public (e.g. music, plays)
❑ To display the work in public (e.g. artwork, movies, computer
games, video on a Web site)
Principles, Laws, and Cases
❑ What does it mean to solve the problems of

technology’s impact on intellectual property rights?

❑ We should recognize that “the problem” looks

different from different perspectives.

Principles, Laws, and Cases
A bit of history
• 1790 first copyright law passed
• 1909 Copyright Act of 1909 defined an unauthorized copy as a form
that could be seen and read visually
• 1976 and 1980 copyright law revised to include software and
databases that exhibit "authorship" (original expression of ideas),
included the "Fair Use Doctrine"
• 1982 high-volume copying became a felony
• 1992 making multiple copies for commercial advantage and private
gain became a felony
 Principles, Laws, and Cases
A bit of History
• 1997 No Electronic Theft Act made it a felony to willfully infringe
copyright by reproducing or distributing one or more copies of
copyrighted work with a total value of more than $1,000 within a six-
month period
• 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits making,
distributing or using tools to circumvent technological copyright
protection systems and included protection from some copyright
lawsuits for Web sites where users post material
• 2005 Congress made it a felony to record a movie in a movie theater
 Principles, Laws, and Cases
• Fair Use Doctrine

• Four factors considered:

1. Purpose and nature of use – commercial (less likely) or nonprofit purposes
2. Nature of the copyrighted work
3. Amount and significance of portion used
4. Effect of use on potential market or value of the copyright work (will it reduce
sales of work?)
• No single factor alone determines
• Not all factors given equal weight, varies by circumstance
 Principles, Laws, and Cases
❑ Ethical arguments about copying
❑ Copying or distributing a song or computer program does
not decrease the use and enjoyment any other person gets
from his or her copy.
❑ Copying can decrease the amount of money that the
copyright owner earns.
 Principles, Laws, and Cases
Discussion Questions
1. How is intellectual property like physical property?

2. How is intellectual property different than physical property?

3. Do you agree with the idea that someone can "own" intellectual property?
Principles, Laws, and Cases
Principles, Laws, and Cases
Significant Cases
Sony v. Universal City Studios (1984)
Supreme Court decided that the makers of a device with legitimate
uses should not be penalized because some people may use it to
infringe on copyright
Supreme Court decided copying movies for later viewing was fair use
Arguments against fair use
People copied the entire work
Movies are creative, not factual
 Principles, Laws, and Cases
Reverse engineering: game machines
a. Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade Inc. (1992)
b. Atari Games v. Nintendo (1992)
c. Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation
(2000)
d. Courts ruled that reverse engineering does not violate copyright if
the intention is to make new creative works (video games), not
copy the original work (the game systems)
Principles, Laws, and Cases
Principles, Laws, and Cases
Significant Cases (Examples)
Sharing music: the Napster case
Napster's arguments for fair use
i. The Sony decision allowed for entertainment use to be
considered fair use
ii. Did not hurt industry sales because users sampled the
music on Napster and bought the CD if they liked it
 Principles, Laws, and Cases
Sharing music: the Napster case (Examples)
a. RIAA's (Recording Industry Association of America) arguments
against fair use
i. "Personal" meant very limited use, not trading with thousands of
strangers
ii. Songs and music are creative works and users were copying
whole songs
iii. Claimed Napster severely hurt sales
b. Court ruled sharing music via copied MP3 files violated copyright
 Principles, Laws, and Cases
Sharing music: the Napster case
a. Was Napster responsible for the actions of its users?
b. Napster's arguments
i. It was the same as a search engine, which is protected
under the DMCA
ii. They did not store any of the MP3 files
iii. Their technology had substantial legitimate uses
Responses to Copyright Infringement
Responses from the Content Industries
Ideas from the software industries
1. Expiration dates within the software
2. Dongles (a device that must be plugged into a computer port)
3. Copy protection that prevents copying
4. Activation or registration codes
5. Court orders to shut down Internet bulletin boards and Web sites
Responses to Copyright Infringement

❑ International Piracy
❑ Some countries do not recognize or protect intellectual property
❑ Countries that have high piracy rates often do not have a
significant software industry
❑ Many countries that have a high amount of piracy are exporting
the pirated copies to countries with strict copyright laws
❑ Economic sanctions often penalize legitimate businesses, not
those they seek to target
Responses to Copyright Infringement

1. Digital Rights Management (DRM)

2. Collectionof techniques that control uses of intellectual
property in digital formats
3. Includes hardware and software schemes using encryption
4. The
producer of a file has flexibility to specify what a user
may do with it
5. Apple, Microsoft and Sony all use different schemes of DRM
 Responses to Copyright Infringement

❑ The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) 1998

❑ Anti circumvention
❑ Prohibit circumventing technological access controls and copy-
prevention systems
❑ Safe harbor
❑ Protect Web sites from lawsuits for copyright infringement by
users of site
 Responses to Copyright Infringement

❑ The DMCA vs. Fair Use, Freedom of Speech, and Innovation

❑ Lawsuits have been filed to ban new technologies
❑ U.S. courts have banned technologies such as DeCSS even though it
has legitimate uses, while courts in other countries have not.
❑ Protesters published the code as part of creative works (in haiku,
songs, short movies, a computer game and art)
❑ U.S. courts eventually allowed publishing of DeCSS, but prohibited
manufacturers of DVD players from including it in their products
Responses to Copyright Infringement

❑ Evolving Business Models

❑ Organizations set up to collect and distribute royalty fees (e.g. the
Copyright Clearance Center), users don't have to search out individual
copyright holders
❑ Sites such as iTunes and the new Napster provide legal means for
obtaining inexpensive music and generate revenue for the industry and
artists
❑ Revenue sharing allows content-sharing sites to enable the posting of
content and share their ad revenues with content owners in
compensation
Responses to Copyright Infringement

❖ Evolving Business Models

❖ Cloud storage raises copyright issues.
a. Is copying legally purchased files to and from the cloud a
fair use?
b. Will the companies operating the cloud services have any
responsibility for unauthorized content their customers
store and share?
c. Since copyright holders do not see what is stored, they do
not have the option of sending takedown notices.
Responses to Copyright Infringement

Evolving Business Models

What does not work
a. Zediva, a small startup in 2011, bought DVDs and rented
the content (not the physical DVD) to customers legally.
Court ordered Zediva to shut down.
b. Pirate Bay
c. Megaupload
 Search Engines and Online Libraries

1. Search Engines
2. Caching and displaying small excerpts is fair use
3. Creating and displaying thumbnail images is fair use
4. Google negotiated licensing agreements with news
services to copy and display headlines, excerpts, and
photos.
5. Trademarked search terms
 Search Engines and Online Libraries

1. Books Online
2. Project Guttenberg digitizes books in the public domain
3. Microsoftscanned millions of public domain books in University
of California's library
4. Google has scanned millions of books that are in the public
domain and that are not; they display only excerpts from those
still copyrighted
5. Some
court rulings favor search engines and information access;
some favor content producers
 Free Software
❑ What is free software?
❑ Free software is an idea advocated and supported by a large,
loose-knit group of computer programmers who allow people to
copy, use, and modify their software
❑ Free means freedom of use, not necessarily lack of cost
❑ Open source - software distributed or made public in source
code (readable and modifiable)
 Free Software
❑ GNU project
❑ Began with a UNIX-like operating system, a sophisticated
text editor, and many compilers and utilities
❑ Now has hundreds of programs freely available and
thousands of software packages available as free software
(with modifiable source code)
❑ Developed the concept of copyleft
 Free Software
❑ Should all software be free?
❑ Would there be sufficient incentives to produce the huge quantity of
consumer software available now?
❑ Would the current funding methods for free software be sufficient to
support all software development?
❑ Should software be covered under copyright law?
❑ Concepts such as copyleft and the GNU Public License provide alternatives
to proprietary software within today's current legal framework
Patents for Inventions in Software
❑ Patent decisions, confusion, and consequences
❑ Patents protect inventions by giving the inventor a
monopoly for a specified time period.
❑ Laws of nature and mathematical formulas cannot be
patented.
❑ Obvious inventions or methods cannot be patented.
Patents for Inventions in Software

❑ To patent or not?
❑ In favor of software patents
a. Reward inventors for their creative work
b. Encourage inventors to disclose their
inventions so others can build upon them
c. Encourage innovation
 Patents for Inventions in Software

❑ To patent or not?
❑ Against software patents
a. Patents can stifle innovation, rather than encourage it.
b. Cost of lawyers to research patents and risk of being sued
discourage small companies from attempting to develop
and market new innovations.
c. It is difficult to determine what is truly original and
distinguish a patentable innovation from one that is not.