5.5 Legal and Ethical Concerns
Enduring Understanding
While computing innovations are typically designed to achieve a specific purpose, they may have unintended consequences.
Learning Objective
Explain how the use of computing can raise legal and ethical concerns.
Essential Knowledge
Material created on a computer is the intellectual property of the creator or an organization.
Ease of access and distribution of digitized information raises intellectual property concerns regarding ownership, value, and use.
Measures should be taken to safeguard intellectual property.
The use of material created by someone else without permission and presented as one’s own is plagiarism and may have legal consequences.
Some examples of legal ways to use materials created by someone else include:
Creative Commons—a public copyright license that enables the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. This is used when the content creator wants to give others the right to share, use, and build upon the work they have created.
open source—programs that are made freely available and may be redistributed and modified
open access—online research output free of any and all restrictions on access and free of many restrictions on use, such as copyright or license restrictions
The use of material created by someone other than you should always be cited.
Creative Commons, open source, and open access have enabled broad access to digital information.
As with any technology or medium, using computing to harm individuals or groups of people raises legal and ethical concerns.
Computing can play a role in social and political issues, which in turn often raises legal and ethical concerns.
The digital divide raises ethical concerns around computing.
Computing innovations can raise legal and ethical concerns. Some examples of these include:
the development of software that allows access to digital media downloads and streaming
the development of algorithms that include bias
§ the existence of computing devices that collect and analyze data by continuously monitoring activities
Last updated