Ethics and Ownership

Computing professionals make decisions that affect many people. This chapter covers the standards they are expected to follow, why creators' work is protected by law, and how software may legally be used and shared. Answers here are usually written as short justified paragraphs, so practise linking each point to the situation in the question.

7.1 Ethics and ownership

Ethics and the computing professional

Ethics are the principles of right and wrong behaviour. Professional bodies such as the British Computer Society (BCS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) publish a code of conduct that members agree to follow. A code of ethics gives guidance on what is acceptable, and protects the public and the reputation of the profession.

The main principles in these codes are:

• Public interest: put the safety, health, privacy and rights of other people first, and do not discriminate.
• Professional competence and integrity: only take on work you are competent to do, be honest about your abilities and the limits of a product, and keep your knowledge up to date.
• Duty to the profession: keep to the law and the standards of the profession, and maintain its reputation.
• Duty to relevant authority (employer and client): carry out work carefully, keep to agreements and respect confidentiality; do not misuse the employer's or client's data.
• Accepting responsibility: be accountable for your own work and its consequences, including admitting mistakes.

The impact of acting ethically or unethically

Think about the effect on each group: the user or customer, the company, the professional and society.

Examples for discussion:

• A software engineer finds a serious security flaw in a product just before launch. Acting ethically means reporting it and delaying the launch until it is fixed, which may cost the company money in the short term. Hiding it risks users' data being stolen and the company being sued.
• A developer is asked to build an app that collects personal data without telling users. An ethical response is to refuse or to insist on consent and a clear privacy policy.
• An employee copies the source code of a previous employer for a new job. This breaches confidentiality and copyright, and can lead to dismissal and legal action.
• Whistle-blowing: reporting wrongdoing within an organisation can protect the public, but the employee may be put at risk.

Artificial intelligence and ethical issues

AI raises ethical questions that you should be able to discuss:

• Bias: an AI trained on unrepresentative data can produce unfair decisions about people (for example in recruitment or loans).
• Privacy: large amounts of personal data may be collected and used to train systems, often without people's understanding.
• Accountability: it can be unclear who is responsible when an AI makes a harmful decision, the developer, the company or the user.
• Jobs and automation: tasks done by people may be replaced by machines.
• Safety and misuse: for example autonomous vehicles making life-or-death decisions, or AI used to make convincing fake images, video and text (deepfakes), or for surveillance.
• Transparency: some AI systems cannot easily explain how they reached a decision.
• Environmental cost: training large models uses a lot of energy.

Applications of AI. Medical diagnosis from scans, self-driving vehicles, chatbots and virtual assistants, recommendation systems, fraud detection, face and speech recognition, translation, robots in factories, and games.

Impact of AI. Social: more convenience and safer roads, but loss of privacy, bias, and the spread of fake content. Economic: higher productivity and new jobs, but some jobs are replaced by automation and the benefits may go to a few large companies. Environmental: AI can reduce waste, for example by saving energy in buildings, but training and running large models uses a great deal of electricity and water.

Why join a professional body. Membership shows a commitment to high standards, gives access to guidance, training and a way of dealing with ethical problems, and a member who breaks the code can be disciplined or removed.

Copyright

Copyright is a legal right that gives the creator of an original work (text, music, images, video, software) the sole right to copy, distribute, adapt and sell it, for a fixed period. Others need the owner's permission, usually through a licence, to use it.

The need for copyright legislation: it protects creators' work and income, so they have a reason to make new work; it stops others from copying and selling it without permission (piracy); and it provides a way to take legal action against those who break the law. In computing, this applies to software and also to code, designs, databases, images and music.

Breaking copyright includes:

• Software piracy: copying, sharing or using a program without a licence, for example installing one purchased copy on many computers, or using a cracked version or key-generating tool.
• Copying code or content (text, images or music) and using it without permission or credit.
• Selling or distributing copies of software that you do not own.

Consequences include fines, legal action and, for companies, a damaged reputation. Measures that software producers use against piracy include licence keys and product activation, digital rights management (DRM), registered user accounts, and holograms or other authentication on physical media.

Types of software licence

A software licence is a legal agreement that says how software may be used.

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A table comparing commercial, shareware, freeware, FSF free software and OSI open source by price, source code, freedom to change and copyleft

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