Archive for the Category ◊ Computer Ethics ◊
Originally found this gem in The Chronicle. Digitizing out of print books and making them available on the web- which will win? Utilitarianism or Kantian Ethics?
“Last month the worldwide effort to thwart the illegal copying and sales of video games took a turn to the draconian, with a number of publishers introducing new measures that often seemed to impact legitimate gamers as much as pirates.
France-based Ubisoft rolled out a new form of digital rights management that require players of their PC games to stay online at all times to play. Japan-based Sony tested out a new system that would require people purchasing one of their Playstation Portable games used to pay an extra $20 to play online. And Nintendo, taking a page from the music industry, levied a $1.5 million dollar suit against an Australian for copying their games.”
“ON the Internet, things get old fast. One prime candidate for the digital dustbin, it seems, is the current approach to protecting privacy on the Internet.
It is an artifact of the 1990s, intended as a light-touch policy to nurture innovation in an emerging industry. And its central concept is “notice and choice,” in which Web sites post notices of their privacy policies and users can then make choices about sites they frequent and the levels of privacy they prefer.
But policy and privacy experts agree that the relentless rise of Internet data harvesting has overrun the old approach of using lengthy written notices to safeguard privacy.”
Read more at the NYTimes
“The history of publishing is swimming with pirates—far more than Adrian Johns expected when he started hunting through the archives for them. And he thinks their stories may hold keys to understanding the latest battles over digital publishing—and the future of the book.”