Property Issues:

Order the following from least bad to most bad.

  1. You are at a party with work associates, whom you would like to impress because promotions in your company often go to those with well-developed social skills. You tell a joke to Rachel, a fellow worker. Later that night she is giving an introduction to the president of the company and she uses your joke, representing it as her own.
  1. You are working on a school assignment late at night and need to draw a figure using a particular graphics package. It is available at school in the lab, but the lab is now closed, so you download a copy from a web site in Smogaria for that one-time use only.
  1. Johan Vaaler invented the paper clip in 1899 and patented it in Germany, but did nothing else with his invention. A year later Cornelius J. Brosnan of Springfield, Massachusetts was awarded a patent for it, so Johan Valler did not profit financially from his invention.
  1. You live in Chicago, where there has been deep snow recently. On the street in front of where you live you dig out a parking spot, then put two old lawn chairs in the spot to save it. You arrive home to discover that someone has moved your chairs and parked in your spot.
  1. Though no longer a poor struggling student, the company you work for doesn’t have the latest versions of the office productivity software you are used to. You figure you could be about 15% more efficient if you had the latest version, which you get for free on a CD from a friend.
  1. You are taking the same class as your friend Francesca, where there is a homework assignment due at noon. You finished most of the assignment, but copy from Francesca the solutions to a couple of problems you didn’t get.
  1. After developing a particularly beautiful strain of miniature roses you get legal protection so that a customer can buy the rose bush in a little pot, but legally they cannot take cuttings from it to cause it to reproduce.
  1. Genomes-R-Us spends millions of dollars mapping a particular part of the human genome that controls human memory loss in Alzheimer’s patients, then trademarks it’s use so that treatment can only be given to those who license the technology.
  1. You figure out a way to securely encrypt data, such that any person using email could encrypt their email so that no one could decrypt it. You copyright your invention and sue the makers of GPG, whose product is based off of the ideas of your own.
  1. You are in class and admire a fancy pen another classmate has. When she is not looking, you take it.

Property Cases – Discussion Questions

Consider the list of cases having to do with intellectual property.

  1. What specifically is the problem in each of the cases?
  2. What are the types of differences that make one case better or worse than the next?
  3. What additional cases having to do with computers, software, and the Internet can you come up with that best raise questions or illustrate problems having to do with intellectual property?
  4. a) As a student, what guidelines would you suggest in establishing intellectual property laws/practices? Please be more specific than the generic “a person has a right to the benefit of their own labor.”
    b) Can these guidelines exist as absolutes, or do they only acquire meaning within a certain context? Does this make them less universal?
    c) How about after you graduate and are in the workplace? Why should/shouldn’t these be the same?
  5. Should the legal and moral defenses of intellectual property be different? Why or why not?