14.4 Ethical Considerations of the Online World
Learning Objectives
- Explain concerns related to surveillance and personal privacy rights introduced by the Internet.
- Differentiate between copyright infringement and fair use.
- Identify plagiarism and copyright concerns introduced by the Internet.
Online media has developed rapidly, with technology advancing at a rate that often surpasses the ability of legislation and policy to keep up with it. As a result, issues like individuals’ rights to privacy, copyright protections, and fair use restrictions have become the subject of numerous court cases and public debates as lawmakers, judges, and civil liberties organizations struggle to define the limits of technology and the access it provides to previously restricted information. This section will look at some of the most prominent issues in today’s online media environment. Reflect on the ethical issues in mass media raised in the two preceding sections and how they manifest in the areas of personal privacy, copyright law, and plagiarism. What impact will this new media environment have?
Privacy and Surveillance
Concerns about online privacy issues in recent years have led some people to wonder whether the collection of personal information on websites has begun to infringe on individuals’ constitutional rights. While the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly guarantee a general right to privacy, the Bill of Rights establishes privacy of beliefs, privacy of the home, and privacy of persons and possessions from unreasonable searches. Additionally, in several cases, the courts have interpreted the “right to liberty” clause as guaranteeing an individual’s right to personal privacy (Linder, 2010). What do these constitutional rights mean when it comes to storing a person’s credit card data online, or tracking his or her Internet searches, or using cookies to collect information about his or her purchasing habits? Because online media has developed so rapidly, federal legislation has not settled many of these issues, which has led to numerous courtroom battles. Consider the 2010 case in which the online services company Yahoo! entered into a legal struggle with government officials who wanted to search the e-mail account of a Yahoo! user for incriminating evidence. While Yahoo! claimed the government would need a search warrant to access a user’s e-mail, the government investigators claimed the Fourth Amendment does not apply in the case of an e-mail account (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2010).
In defense of information collection and surveillance, many websites argue that, by using their services, individuals agree to make their personal information available. However, many people don’t realize the extent of surveillance capabilities or know how to protect certain personal information while using online tools. The more people rely on the Internet for shopping, communication, social networking, and media consumption, the more their personal data is stored online. Every time a person subscribes to a magazine, joins an organization, donates money to charity, gives to a political cause, or searches the pages of a government agency, the computer stores that information (Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 2010). For example, cookies, text files that web page servers embed in users’ hard drives, help search engines like Google and Amazon track their customers’ search histories, buying habits, and browsing patterns. Cookies stored by Google last for 30 years (Godoy, 2006). Search engines use these cookies to customize users’ searches and third-party ads based on a particular user’s demographics and behavior. However, privacy advocates claim this practice fosters predatory advertising (Spring, 2010). Additionally, considering that search engines receive multiple requests per day for specific information on their users (requests often tied to criminal investigations and lawsuits), critics fear that unfair or even erroneous profiling may result.
Computers store much of this information without users’ knowledge or informed consent—although agreements for most software inform users when they collect data, few people have the patience or time to read and understand the dense legalistic language of these agreements. Even when users invest the time and effort to understand the agreements, they must make an important decision to agree with the terms to use the useful software or not.
Internet users concerned about their online privacy have to contend with another issue: the combination of online data with offline information to build an even more robust profile of those individuals. Data providers like BlueKai, Datalogic, and Nielsen pool offline data and demographics to create “digital dossiers” (detailed digital records of a particular subject or market) for online advertisers who want to reach a target market.
This combination of online and offline information provides a nearly complete picture of someone’s life. If advertisers seek a 56-year-old retired and divorced female educator who owns a home and a dog, suffers from arthritis, and plays tennis at the local fitness club, they can now find her. While advertisers like to point out that they identify individuals by a demographic subgroup and never by name, many organizations that advocate for privacy, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation , believe that protections and greater transparency should be enforced (Spring, 2010).
Users also supply a wide range of information about themselves through online social networks connected with their names, contact information, and photographs. Creditors now look at individuals’ social networks to determine whether they would maintain good credit, and banks may access social network information to make loan decisions (Mies, 2010). If users do not monitor their privacy settings on social media platforms, anyone performing a Google search may easily access photographs and other private information.
Surveillance can range from the monitoring of online activity by employers and other institutions that want to make sure users follow the platform’s guidelines, to high-level government investigations of terrorist activity. The USA PATRIOT Act, passed just six weeks after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, expanded the federal government’s rights to access citizens’ personal information. Under the Patriot Act, authorities have access to personal records held by Internet service providers and other third parties, and government officials can tap into an individual’s e-mail communications and web searches if the government suspects the person of terrorist activity or of having connections to terrorist activity (American Civil Liberties Union, 2003; Olsen, 2001). Civil liberties organizations expressed concern that the Patriot Act might become a back door for the government to conduct undisclosed surveillance that doesn’t necessarily involve the threat of terrorism. For instance, under the Patriot Act the government can wiretap Internet communications even if the primary purpose is a criminal investigation, as long as intelligence gathering is a significant purpose of the investigation (Harvard Law School).
Fair Use and Plagiarism
Now that people can conduct a large amount of research online, the temptation to copy and paste content from one platform to another with no more than the click of a button has increased the concerns and practice of plagiarism and copyright infringement. People can easily confuse the concepts of copyright infringement and plagiarism with each other, so the following section provides an overview of copyright, its issues and limitations, and its distinction from plagiarism.
Copyright Infringement
Copyright offers a form of protection provided by U.S. law, which automatically bestows upon the creator of an original artistic or intellectual work certain rights, including the right to distribute, copy, and modify the work (U.S. Copyright Office). For example, if Marcus rents a movie from Netflix and watches it with his friends, he hasn’t violated any copyright laws because Netflix has paid for a license to loan the movie to its customers. However, he rents a physical version of the movie and burns himself a copy to watch later, he has violated copyright law because he has not paid for nor obtained the film creators’ permission to copy the movie. Copyright law applies to most books, songs, movies, art, essays, and other pieces of creative work. However, after a certain length of time (70 to 120 years depending on the publication circumstances), creative and intellectual works enter the public domain, which means any entity may freely use or copy the content without permission.
Google Books: Turning Copyright Law on Its Head?
In 2002, Google began scanning millions of books in academic libraries to make them available online in digital format. Of the more than 12 million books Google has digitized since then—and made searchable through Google Book Search—2 million reside in the public domain. Users can peruse and download those 2 million books in “full view” and for free, while they present books still under copyright as limited previews, where users can access about 20 percent of the texts. According to Google, the project will pave the way for greater democratization of knowledge, making texts available to readers who formerly wouldn’t have had access to them. However, many authors, publishers, and legal authorities claim the project represents a massive copyright violation. In 2005, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed class-action lawsuits against Google (Newitz, 2010).
William Cavanaugh, a lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice, claimed that the Google Books Settlement, an agreement partially reached in 2008, “turns copyright law on its head.” According to the settlement agreement, in exchange for $125 million, part of which would go to authors and publishers, the courts released Google from liability for copying the books and granted them the right to charge money for individual and institutional subscriptions to its Google Books service (which gives subscribers full access to the copied books—even those under copyright). Authors have the choice to opt out of the agreement, asking to have their books removed from Google’s servers. However, more than 30,000 publishers have already made deals with Google, which override the authors’ rights to opt out (Oder, 2010).
Some works are in the public domain because the creator has chosen to make them available to anyone without requiring permission. However, most works end up in the public domain because their copyright has expired; in the United States, anything published before 1923 automatically enters the public domain. Additionally, changes to U.S. copyright law over the years have caused some works to enter the public domain earlier. Before 1964, for instance, any published work had to have its copyright renewed during the 28th year after its publication. If the creator did not file a renewal, the copyright was lost. Figure 14 .8 outlines the significant changes to U.S. copyright law since 1790 (Press, 2007).
Copyright law offers many protections for a creator, but it does have limitations. The policy of “fair use” stipulates the public may freely use copyrighted information for purposes such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research, or parody (U.S. Copyright Office, 2009). When a critic writes a book review for a magazine, for instance, according to fair use, she could summarize and quote from the book, whether or not the author of the book agreed to this use. The U.S. government considers these four issues when determining fair use:
- The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use constitutes commercial or nonprofit educational purposes
- The nature of the copyrighted work
- The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
- The effect of the use on the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work (U.S. Copyright Office, 2009)
The distinction between fair use and copyright infringement does not always obviously present itself. For one thing, the courts have not issued guidelines that specify the number of words, lines, or notes that people can use without permission. See the table below for some examples of distinctions between fair use and copyright infringement.
Cases Involving Fair Use
|
Fair Use |
Not Fair Use |
|---|---|
|
Wright v. Warner Books Inc. (1991): In a biography of Richard Wright the biographer quoted from six of Wright’s unpublished letters and 10 unpublished journal entries. CONSIDERATIONS: The copied letters amounted to less than one percent of Wright’s total letter material. Additionally, the biographer copied the documents because he intended to inform his audience. |
Castle Rock Entertainment Inc. v. Carol Publication Group (1998): Carol Publication published a book of trivia questions about the TV series Seinfeld. The book included direct quotes from the show and based its questions on characters and events in the series.
CONSIDERATIONS: The book infringed on the ability of Castle Rock (the copyright holder) to make its own trivia books. |
|
Perfect 10 Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc. (2007): A Google search engine displayed thumbnail-sized photos of nude models from a subscription-only website. CONSIDERATIONS: The search engine’s use of the photos transformed them into “pointers,” directing users to the photos’ source. The transformative use reduced Google’s ability to make any money from displaying the images. |
Los Angeles News Service v. KCAL-TV Channel 9 (1997): A TV news station used a 30-second segment of a four-minute video that depicted the beating of a Los Angeles man. The Los Angeles News Service owned the copyright to the video.
CONSIDERATIONS: The segment used by the news station displayed a significant portion of the total video. Additionally, KCAL profited from its use and infringed on the Los Angeles News Service’s ability to market the video. |
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Source: Stanford University Libraries. “Copyright & Fair Use.” http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-c.html |
Plagiarism
Sometimes plagiarism becomes confused with copyright violation. However, the two words do not mean the same thing; while some overlap between the concepts exists, not every instance of plagiarism involves copyright violation, and not every instance of copyright violation signifies an act of plagiarism. For one thing, while copyright violation can involve a wide range of acts, plagiarists more narrowly use someone else’s information, writing, or speech without properly documenting or citing the source. In other words, plagiarism involves representing another person’s work as one’s own.
As the U.S. Copyright Office points out, it is possible to cite a copyrighted source of information without obtaining permission to reproduce that information.
In such a case, the user has violated copyright law even though she has not plagiarized the material. Similarly, a student writing a paper could copy sections of a document in the public domain without properly citing his sources, in which case he would not have broken any copyright laws. However, representing the information as his own work would qualify as plagiarism.
Plagiarism, a perennially serious problem at academic institutions, has recently become even more prevalent. The ease of copying and pasting online content into a word-processing document can make it highly tempting for students to plagiarize material for research projects and critical papers. Additionally, a number of online “paper mills” contain archives where students can download papers for free or, in some cases, purchase them (Denhart, 1999). In 2003, The New York Times surveyed students at 23 college campuses and reported that 38 percent of students admitted to having committed copy-and-paste plagiarism within the previous year (De Leon, 2007).
To combat the rise in plagiarism, many schools and universities now subscribe to services that allow instructors to check students’ work for plagiarized material. Plagiarism.org, for instance, offers an analytics tool that compares student writing against a database that includes work from online paper mills, academic databases, documents available through major search engines, and other student papers submitted to Plagiarism.org.
Many researchers link the problem to the fact that students don’t understand what constitutes plagiarism. Some students, for instance, treat information they find online as if its online presence signified an automatic placement within the public domain (Auer & Krupar, 2001). The following list offers suggestions for ways to avoid plagiarism in original work.
- Don’t procrastinate.
- Avoid taking shortcuts.
- Take thorough notes and keep accurate records.
- Rephrase ideas originally.
- Provide citations or attributions for all sources.
- Ask the instructor when in doubt (Longman Publishers).
While plagiarism remains an issue of academic concern, it occurs in print media as well. Writers, whether through carelessness or laziness, may lift content from existing materials without properly citing or reinterpreting them. In an academic setting, plagiarism may lead to consequences as severe as failure or even expulsion from an institution. However, outside of academia the consequences may prove even more damaging. Writers have lost publishing contracts, permanently damaged their reputations, and even ruined their careers over instances of plagiarism. For example, Ronald Mack successfully sued the late George Harrison, of the Beatles, for copyright infringement of his song “He’s So Fine.” The court determined that Harrison unconsciously plagiarized the musical essence of Mack’s song for his composition “My Sweet Lord.”
