Thousands of high schools and colleges submit term papers and essays to a service that checks them for plagiarism by comparing them to its database of millions of student papers and to material on the Web and in journal archives. The service builds its database of student papers by adding those the schools submit for checking. Several students sued the company for infringing their copyrights by adding their papers to the database. Analyze the case. Give arguments for both sides. Which do you think should win? Why?
a. Describe how the fair-use guidelines apply to making a video of oneself lip-synching to a popular song and posting the video on a social networking site. Do you think it is ethical to do this?
b.In the 1990s, two writers suggested that software is a ‘public good’, like public schools and national defense, that we should allow anyone to copy it, and that the government should subsidize it. Suppose this proposal had been adopted then. How well do you think it would have worked? How would it have affected the quantity and quality of software produced? Give reasons.