safety/security

As soon as you use a networked computer, you are sharing resources with other users, some of them in only distantly-connected portions of the internet. You have contradictory impulses: on the one hand you want to share some files, email and text messages, and software, on the other hand you don't want to (completely) share all the information and resources on your machine with every other user on the internet. Trying to balance these contradictory impulses is what makes network security difficult.

At one extreme, there have been those who argue that you shouldn't put anything on a computer that you aren't prepared to share with all comers (Richard Stallman, founder of the Gnu software movement, for example). At the other extreme, you can probably be completely sure that the contents of your computer are secure if you encrypt everything and then unplug your machine. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Some standard measure to reduce your exposure to either malicious or inadvertent harm to your computer's security:

You may also want to investigate various spam filters, to reduce the volume of junk email you are exposed to. Currently over 80% of the mail sent to me is spam, and almost all of that is automatically diverted to a mailbox called "spam" that I review occasionally.

Property, intellectual and otherwise

Custom and law recognize individual's right to control (and prevent others from controlling or using) property. There are sharp differences between societies, and individuals within a given society, as to what things may be property, and what limits there should be on control of property. You may find sharp disagreements over whether the following should be considered property:

Canadian attitudes and laws on property are historically inherited from British (and French, for Quebec civil law) practice, and are now increasingly harmonized with American practice through trade agreements. There is a growing trend to limit the scope for things that have no owner (the commons). There is an explicit argument for privatizing the commons (look for the [tragedy of the commons]), as well as an occasionally violent history of doing so over the objections of the common "owners".

This is the background against which we find an increase in the variety of intellectual property, and an increase in the protection of exclusive right to use that property.

Rationales for property

There are (at least) two sorts arguments offered for why we should have and respect property. You'll find that the arguments correspond to ethical systems you've already encountered.

Natural right to property
There is wide-spread acceptance that certain types of property belong to their owners by a natural right. A human being is usually considered to be the owner of his/her body, having the right to use it as he/she will (this is not true in all societies, and most societies put some limits on the degree of control you have of your body). Items that are in your possession, closely associated with your body, especially if this is due to your labour or effort are considered to be your property in most societies: your clothes, home, toothbrush. As things are farther removed from our physical possession, what rationale is there for saying that we own them, and can forbid (or limit) others from using them?

John Locke (1600s) argued that by mixing our labour with nature (the commons), we convert it into our property. He used the example of cutting down a tree from the common forest and converting it into furniture or firewood. Before we work on it, the tree belongs to nobody (or everybody). After we work on it, the wood is our property to burn, sit on, or sell, as we choose. By extension, everything we mix our labour with becomes our property.

Locke allowed some restriction on this way of acquiring property: you should only get as much as you need, leaving enough in the common state for others in society.

As recently as 1970, this principle applied in Canada in the form of homesteading. You could convert Crown land into your property by clearing a certain portion, sinking a well, and building a certain number of structures. The notion of "sweat equity" also reflects this argument.

Property helps society
Another line of argument is that any resource that doesn't have an owner is used inefficiently (see the [tragedy of the commons]). In this argument, as things become scarce (and desirable) we need to assign owners to them so that they aren't squandered, and the ownership can be passed around using the market.

This argument sidesteps the issue of whether a particular sort of property is right or wrong, arguing instead that it is beneficial.

Critiques

Intellectual property before computers

Some ownership of intellectual products was recognized long before computers. For centuries, authors have had ownership of works of art or literature recognized as their property, with the right to decide how they are reproduced, sold, displayed, or derived into new works (copyright). An individual's right to keep ideas to him/herself has been similarly recognized. If you take measures to keep an idea secret, there is legal protection against other people breaking your secret (e.g. trade secrets). Your trademark or brand may be so closely associated with good quality in a product that you register it with the government, and acquire the exclusive right to use that mark (unless this is watered down by common usage, as for example in the case of kleenex). You may register a new invention with the patent office so that although it becomes public knowledge, you have exclusive right to use it for a number (an increasing number) of years.

On this continent, the second line of argument for property (property helps society) has been most often used to establish and extend intellectual property. Since the early 1800s there has been an increasing variety of copyrightable articles, and an increasing number of years of copyright protection. Lawmakers and judges often agreed to expand intellectual property rights based on the argument that it promoted economic well-being and innovation.

The argument that property helps society often recognizes limits to how useful property can be. In the case of copyright, there is a recognized principle of fair use which allows the use of copyrighted material without permission of the owner. This principle is often weighed by a judge on a case-by-case basis, rather than spelled out in law. Some considerations (in the U.S.) are:

An example of a conflict between copyright and fair use was the case of Sony's VCR versus Universal Studios. The judgement (relieving Sony of responsibility for copyright infringements by VCR users) was based on considering fair use principles. The U.S. supreme court decided that most VCR users wanted time-shifting, a legitimate fair use.[1]

There has been criticism of intellectual property outside the realm of computers. For example, the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the U.S. in 1988, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 increased the length of patent protection for among other things, pharmaceutical drugs. Many have argued that the higher cost of these name-brand drugs compared to their generic counterparts is a large component of increased health-care costs in Canada over the last two decades.

Intellectual property, computers, and the net

Computers haven't changed the nature of intellectual property so much as highlighted some of the issues. Computers have made it cheaper and easier to make copies of products whose main content is intellectual rather than material. The cost of blank CDs or hard drive storage is insignificant in comparison to the value claimed for the music or software recorded on them. Files (arguably containing intellectual property) can quickly be transferred long distances over the internet. Copyright protection of music and software have become two hotspots.

p2p and music
Although it has always been possible to copy music, the quality of the copy was harder to guarantee before the widespread availability of CD burners. In the era of vinyl records, we made tapes with hisses and pops, but by the second generation (tape-to-tape) they became pretty poor. However, a CD burner can make a faithful copy of the original CD, and the owners of record labels have argued this has cut into their sales of original CDs. With the development of MP3 format (fairly faithful, compressed music files) this is accelerated, since a large amount of music can be freely transferred across the net. The response of the recording industry (RIAA in the U.S., [CRIA] in Canada) has been to seek (and often win) increased copyright protection. However, many recording artists oppose stricter copyright [artists for open copyright]. Your right to use copyrighted music (and other materials) could be seriously restricted over the next few months, depending on whether the copyright act currently being considered by parliament is enacted.

In the U.S. the Digital Millenium Coypright Act increased the penalities for copyright violation and removed (in many cases) the application of fair use --- basically no copies for any purpose. Even public discussion of methods to circumvent copyright controls was outlawed. Individuals and companies were prosecuted for:

After three attempts, Canada's governing Conservatives finally passed bill C-11, which increases penalties for some copyright infringement (like the DCMA) but with generally lower penalties, increases the scope of fair dealing, and introduces strong penalties for breaking digital locks (DRM).

software
As computer programs began to have value separate from the hardware they ran on, copyright began to extend to them as well. Until the 1960s, computer programs were typically circulated free of charge with the computers they were written for, so that the end user could modify them and fix bugs as needed. Once copyright crept into this area, although the source (human-readable) program wasn't generally copyrighted, the machine-readable program was copyrighted, allowing the end-user to copy it to a hard drive, and from there to RAM so that the program could run.

Commercial software typically copyrights the machine-readable file that the end-user buys, while keeping the human-readable source code as a trade secret. Illicit copying is of course widespread, and there are fierce programs to stamp this out. In jurisdictions where the copyright is recognized, fines, seizure of hard drives, and even jail are sought for those who "pirate" software. In jurisdictions where copyright is not (as fully) recognized, intense pressure is applied to make them adopt laws that recognize "intellectual property".

open-source
The tradition of creating intangible goods that don't become property also continued after the advent of modern computers. As noted above, when software value was a tiny portion of the value of the hardware it accompanied, it was generally included (with the human-readable source) with a computer purchase. A great deal of the legacy of computer software that allows the Internet, modern computer servers, and scientific computing to function was written to be shared with colleagues. The authors of this software had their wages paid for their work running and designing computer systems, and software creation was a side-effect.

As copyrighted software began to intrude on this tradition, the open software response took form. For example, the GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) project undertook to create an entire operating system that was open-source: you may use and modify the program in any way you see fit, including selling it to someone else. When the huge inventory of GNU utilities was combined with Linus Torvald's open-source unix clone, this became a realistic option for those who wanted a non-proprietary operating system. A wide-variety of Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) has developed. To prevent open-source software from becoming proprietery software, there is a group promoting open-source as prior art (OSAPA) [#].

The strength of open-source software is the potentially large community of developers writing software, and the speed with which bugs can be fixed and features added. For certain applications, for example http web servers, the open-source version is also the leading version. In some other applications (many desktop environments) proprietary software dominates.