Intellectual Property

Tom Kelliher, CS 200

Feb. 28, 2008

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Assignment

Read: Chapter 5.

Turn in answers to these questions: 10, 28, 37.

Turn in a one paragraph abstract describing your paper/presentation topic (20% of your paper grade). Presentations will be April 17 and 24. Two presentations per class, 20 minutes each.

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Chapter Summary

  1. Intellectual property (IP)
    1. What is it?

    2. We have a natural right to physical property. What about intellectual property?

    3. Benefits/costs of intellectual property protection. Limitations.

  2. IP protection mechanisms: trade secrets, Trademarks and service marks, patents, copyrights.

  3. Fair use:
    1. Four part test: Purpose and character of the use, nature of the work being copied, how much is being copied, how will the use affect the market for the work.

    2. Goucher's response: IP policy; safe harbor rules; Fair Use Committee.

    3. Time shifting and space shifting.

  4. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA):
    1. Strictures on fair use (personal copying).

    2. Digital rights management. Encrypted CDs (Microsoft vs. Apple wrt .wma media file format).

  5. Peer-to-Peer Networks
    1. Napster, etc.

    2. eDigix service at Goucher. The ``right to violate copyright.''

  6. Protecting Software:
    1. Copyrights and patents.

  7. Open source software. Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

    Problems: quality, splintering (unintended forks in development path, a la Unix).

  8. Ethical analyses of:
    1. IP protection for software.

    2. Copying IP.

Discussion Questions

  1. Real life example: a Goucher faculty member suspects a student of plagiarism and uploads the student's paper to an online plagiarism checking service. The service returns a ``hit'' and the student is sent to the Honor Board. Next semester, the same student has the same professor for another class. This time, the student puts a copyright notice on his submitted paper.

  2. Pps. 203-: 24, 25, 31, 32, 34.


Thomas P. Kelliher 2008-02-26
Tom Kelliher