Intellectual Property

Tom Kelliher, CS 200

Feb. 19, 2009

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Assignment

Read: Chapter 5.

Turn in answers to these questions: 12, 31, and 40.

Turn in a one paragraph abstract describing your paper/presentation topic (20% of your paper grade). Presentations will be April 9, 16, 23, and 30. Three presentations per class, 15-20 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, space shifting, format 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. 210-: 25, 26, 27, 34, 35, and 37.

Tom Kelliher