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Copyright and IP: how much do you know?

ACS, Information Age

14/12/2004 14:32:19

When people join the ACS they agree to abide by the code of ethics and standards of conduct of the society. The code and standards are important elements of our society, they help to define what we mean by being a professional in our industry.

A role of the Committee on Computer Ethics (CCE), which is part of the Community Affairs Board, is to help members to understand the practicalities of the codes and standards. To this end some members of the committee have produced a set of cases to illustrate the various requirements of the code and standards. The complete set of cases, cross referenced to the code, can be found by logging into the ACS members Web site and selecting "Publications" and then "ACS Resources and Research".

The first case is about copyright and IP, so it is important that we give details of previous publications of the case. This case is one of nine which originally appeared in Anderson et al (1993), and permission to copy all or part of the ACM paper is given at the end of that paper, provided proper acknowledgement is made. Oliver Burmeister (2000) then used these cases in his paper, and related them to the ACS code of ethics. Oliver is the chairman of the CCE, and has agreed to the use of his material in this column. So, here is the case.

Jean, a statistical database programmer, is trying to write a large statistical program needed by her company. Programmers in this company are encouraged to write about their work and to publish their algorithms in professional journals. After months of tedious programming, Jean has found herself stuck on several parts of the program. Her manager, not recognising the complexity of the problem, wants the job completed within the next few days.

Not knowing how to solve the problems, Jean remembers that a co-worker had given her source listings from his current work and from an early version of a commercial software package developed at another company. On studying these programs, she sees two areas of code which could be directly incorporated into her own program.

She uses segments of code from both her co-worker and the commercial software, but does not tell anyone or mention it in the documentation. She completes the project and turns it in a day ahead of time.

Some questions to consider are: • What are the issues here? • What would you do? • How can the ACS code help? • Does your organisation have a policy about this issue? • Should it have one?

Commentary on the case

Note: The Code of Ethics and Standards of Conduct are part of the ACS Regulations, and the numbers in brackets in the following commentary refer to the relevant clauses in those regulations. The third value of the Code is Honesty (4.3.3) "I must be honest in my representations of skills . . .", and in particular the standards about not misrepresenting one's skills (4.7.2) and about giving due credit to others (4.7.6), have been violated by Jean.

By not giving credit to her co-worker and the commercial software that presumably was copyrighted/protected by law, Jean has violated professional ethics. She has also violated the standard about respecting the proprietary nature of other's information (4.5.3). Jean should have checked to see if her company was permitted to use the source code, prior to using it, otherwise she might expose her employer to legal liability.

Even if Jean had merely sought the source code for ideas and then completely written her own program, she should have acknowledged her co-worker in the documentation. Obviously judgement is called for here: if the intellectual contribution from the co-worker was of a trivial nature, then there would not have been a need to acknowledge it. Finally, this may be an issue of Jean's competence, and the value "I must work competently and diligently..." (4.3.2) would apply. For further perspectives in this area, the following would be helpful:

Anderson, R.E., Johnson, D.G., Gotterbarn, D. and Perrolle, J. (1993): Using the New ACM Code of Ethics in Decision Making, Communications of the ACM, 36, (1): February, 98-107.

Burmeister, O. K. (2000): Applying the ACS Code of Ethics, Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology, 32, (2): May, 107-120.

Cifuentes, C. and FITZGERALD, A. (1997): Copyright in Shareware Programs Distributed on the Internet, The Australian Computer Journal, 29(1): 24-30.

Novak, P., Murrow, J. and Sinclair, S. (1999): Fair Use: Ethical Guidelines for the Educational Use of Copyrighted Material and the Internet, Australian Institute of Computer Ethics Conference, Lilydale: Swinburne University of Technology, July, 265-275.

Please provide any feedback you have on this column to the CCE, via e-mail to Oliver Burmeister, oburmeister@it.swin.edu.au