Computer Ethics report

[rico001]

Computer Ethics


I am taking this computer ethics class and any help would be much appreciated with a 10 page bodied report I have to write. I thought about writing it on software piracy and including roms. It's due in 8 weeks and any help is most appreciated.

Try to keep posts resonable. I do also want to remain ethical in writing this report.
Much thanks for the help.

Does anybody have good MLA guidelines to look at??

The professor said...
You can get help from Internet Forums if needed. Also, as long as the resource, author, date and page are cited that is okay (and in other identifying information)

Thanks in Advance

 

[vampireuk]

You are asking about ethics at a forum where all we do all day is download pr0n :happy:

Piracy to some extent is perfectly fine imo, for example if you actually want to try something before you blow your hard earned cash on it. We the consumer have a right to know what something is like before we waste cash. However again imo there is a downside to piracy. Those who only ever download things and never buy them. I just cant see the point to it "duuuh I can downwoad moobies a gaaaames without paayeeeng".

 

[t0rek]

Please be serious vampireuk, we know piracy is cool but he really need some help, BTW maybe you are downloading porn all the day but I'm not <_<

 

[vampireuk]

I was been serious after the first sentence

 

[AlphaWolf]

I'm at a loss for what you're looking for. Legal perspective vs moral perspective perhapse?

 

[Eagle]

I'm at a loss for what you're looking for. Legal perspective vs moral perspective perhapse?

Legal perspective... Its illegal.
Moral perspective... its what they get for charging $50+ each for them when it only costs them $15+ each for them. (It averages out really, calculating in the cost of labor, materials, and equipment vs the number of units sold it really only costs them $15 each, not to mention if they were cheaper more people would buy them instead of emulating them raising the units sold)

In short I blame software companies and video game producers for inflation and one day..... I hope to be just like them.

 

[Malcolm]

Here was my high school statement that I gave to the whole computer department staff and students last year about piracy:

Everyone, before we talk about piracy we must look at what piracy actually is. Piracy is defined as "The unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted or patented material". This means copying software and/or music along with other computer data.

Now that piracy has started to go mainstream in our world for a sole reason: companies charge too much money for users to buy legal copies of the pirated data. Now does this make it right, no. But we are on the topic of ethics and both sides, corporate and user must be viewed.

The corporate view of piracy is users "ripping" their copyrighted data and distributing in through any type of media to someone else. Even if the user getting the copy owns the exact same original, this is still considered wrong. The only point in time where "ripping" any media that has copyrighted data is acceptable is when the ULA/copyright agreement states you can make one (1) back-up copy.

[I will narrow this down for EmuTalks purposes. ROMs are totally illegal no matter how they are obtained. If you own a Cartage for a game and download a ROM you have committed an illegal act. If you own a cartage and transfer the cartages ROM image to anything you have committed and illegal act.]

Now from the prospective of the user. Most users find that software companies over price their software, mainly Microsoft, and also complaining that if they were to pay large amounts of more for software that it should be bug-free (or at least mostly bug-free) at time of purchase, and that the only user data that they should have to submit on their license is warranty information. Also quite a few users find is acceptable to pirate software if the corporation is highly established.

In closing, most users would buy software if it were marked at a price that the software was actually worth. Because of the ever growing piracy protection programs these days quite a lot of users have switched over to an Operation System that is free like Linux of a BSD distribution, because with these Operating Systems not only is the OS free, most typical user programs are also free.


Now that was a quick 3 mins speech that I gave to about 150 ppls

If you'd like me to talk about the ethics of the Internet industry just tell me

 

[AlphaWolf]

In short I blame software companies and video game producers for inflation and one day..... I hope to be just like them.

They are not to blame, the consumer is. I remember in my free enterprise class how companies use a price index to do this. The cost of production has little to do with anything. They collect marketing data from very reliable sources to find out x number of units that joe shmoe will buy at y price. They sell at the price that brings in the most profit, even if it is rediculously high (or even low) compared to what it costs to make, because they can be very certain that regular consumers like you and I will buy it at that price (well, I like to think I know better but you get the idea).

Speaking of which, I saw an example of this today. I was just reading a slashdot article that explained how you can get a radeon 9500 to perform exactly the same as a radeon 9700. The 9500 costs roughly half that of the 9700. Basicaly ATI just wants to hold as many wallets as they can. So, they make a sellable product, sell it at the most profitable price, then they want the wallets of those who aren't willing to spend as much as the early adoptors, so they cripple that exact same product, then sell it at a cheaper price, even though the crippled product costs the same price to manufacture. (in some cases it costs more to cripple the product, intel did this with the 486DX crippled to become an SX, they just disabled the math coprocessor component, even though it was still present in the chip)

Heres something that will realy make your blood boil: Most of the employees will get paid the same no matter if the product is a huge success or a flop (assuming they keep their jobs of course), the bulk of the profits goes to the executives and the shareholders.

This is one of about 101 reasons why I refuse to even touch the idea of getting an education for any job in the tech industry (or anything related to computers for that matter) with a 10 foot pole.

 

[AlphaWolf]

The corporate view of piracy is users "ripping" their copyrighted data and distributing in through any type of media to someone else. Even if the user getting the copy owns the exact same original, this is still considered wrong. The only point in time where "ripping" any media that has copyrighted data is acceptable is when the ULA/copyright agreement states you can make one (1) back-up copy.

They can tell you its wrong all they want, they can try to sue you all they want (and will more than likely fail), but fair use laws guarentee your right to do any of this so long as you aren't passing it to others. Even if you sign an EULA saying that you will not do such and such things, the law is the law, and it says that you can make as many personal use backups as you damn well please, so there is simply no way in hell that they can legaly bind you to this. At least this is true in the US anyways. Heres a recent case that shows exactly what I am talking about.

[I will narrow this down for EmuTalks purposes. ROMs are totally illegal no matter how they are obtained. If you own a Cartage for a game and download a ROM you have committed an illegal act. If you own a cartage and transfer the cartages ROM image to anything you have committed and illegal act.]

This is actualy not true, backing up a rom is exactly the same as backing up a cd in the eyes of the law. Show me which law contradicts what I just said.

 

[Malcolm]

Alpha,

ROMs consist of data that is originally stored on chips inside a game cartage, right? Well, these chips are patented thus they don't conform to regular data agreements. By downloading the data stored on the chips you are breaking the specific copyright law that can be enforced with the patent. Thus they do not conform to the laws you stated above ^_^.

Also, I'm not fighting about this, its computer ethics from a 3rd person view, objectively, trying to get to the answers

 

[AlphaWolf]

I don't know a whole lot about patents, but afaik, a patent allows a company to sell an idea, not content, with protection from somebody else from selling that same idea for X number of years, ranges from 5 to 20. So, lets assume they *did* hold a patent, dumping would still not be against copyright law. In this case the only violation of the law would be the sale of a rom dumper itself that has to make use of whats specified in that patent in order to perform its function. But, that aside...

I cant speak for any console other than SNES and the classic atari systems (although I am pretty sure it applies to the rest as well), but when I have taken apart their cartridges, I noticed that they use industry standard rom chips. There are no patents on these. With these type of rom chips, dumping whats in them is exactly the same as dumping the contents of a cd. The only difference is the rom is a solid state storage, and the cd is an optical storage. The law makes no distinction between the two in fair use.

Now I don't know about n64, but assuming the rom chips that they used werent industry standard (where I am pretty sure that they were), and they did have a patent on them, their patent was probably something very trivial and was probably only granted for 5 years, so even if patents did apply, they would probably have no legal grounds to stop you from doing anything like this now anyways.