How John Deere Hijacked Copyright Law To Keep You From Tinkering With Your Tractor; Reason, January 8, 2024

 LUKE HOGG , Reason; How John Deere Hijacked Copyright Law To Keep You From Tinkering With Your Tractor

"For nearly 25 years, Section 1201 has been hanging over the developers and distributors of tools that give users more control over the products they own. The ways in which John Deere and other corporations have used the copyright system is a glaring example of regulatory capture in action, highlighting the absurdity of a system where owning a product doesn't necessarily convey the right to fully control it. There are certainly circumstances where the manufacturers are justified in protecting their products from tampering, but such cases should be handled through warranty nullification and contract law, not through exorbitant fines and lengthy prison sentences."

Open Access, Open Source, and the Battle to Defeat COVID-19; JD Supra, April 22, 2020

PerkinsCoie, JD Supra; Open Access, Open Source, and the Battle to Defeat COVID-19

"No legal development over the past decades has had a greater impact on the free flow of information and technology than the rise of the open access and open source movements. We recently looked at how AI, machine learning, blockchain, 3D printing, and other disruptive technologies are being employed in response to the coronavirus pandemic; we now turn to how two disruptive legal innovations, open access and open source, are being used to fight COVID-19. Although the pandemic is far from over, there are already promising signs that open access and open source solutions are allowing large groups of scientists, healthcare professionals, software developers, and innovators across many countries to mobilize quickly and effectively to combat and, hopefully, mitigate the impact of the coronavirus."

AI researchers propose ‘bias bounties’ to put ethics principles into practice; VentureBeat, April 17, 2020

Khari Johnson, VentureBeat; AI researchers propose ‘bias bounties’ to put ethics principles into practice

"Researchers from Google Brain, Intel, OpenAI, and top research labs in the U.S. and Europe joined forces this week to release what the group calls a toolbox for turning AI ethics principles into practice. The kit for organizations creating AI models includes the idea of paying developers for finding bias in AI, akin to the bug bounties offered in security software.

This recommendation and other ideas for ensuring AI is made with public trust and societal well-being in mind were detailed in a preprint paper published this week. The bug bounty hunting community might be too small to create strong assurances, but developers could still unearth more bias than is revealed by measures in place today, the authors say."

An Open Source License That Requires Users to Do No Harm; Wired, October 4, 2019

Klint Finley, Wired;

An Open Source License That Requires Users to Do No Harm

Open source software can generally be freely copied and reused. One developer wants to impose ethical constraints on the practice.

"Increasingly, some developers are calling on their employers and the government to stop using their work in ways they believe are unethical...

Coraline Ada Ehmke wants to give her fellow developers more control over how their software is used. Software released under her new "Hippocratic License" can be shared and modified for almost any purpose, with one big exception: "Individuals, corporations, governments, or other groups for systems or activities that actively and knowingly endanger, harm, or otherwise threaten the physical, mental, economic, or general well-being of individuals or groups in violation of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Defining what it means to do harm is inherently contentious, but Ehmke hopes that tying the license to existing international standards will reduce the uncertainty. The declaration of human rights "is a document that's 70 years old and is pretty well established and accepted for its definition of harm and what violating human rights really means," she says."

Why Software Developers Should Take Ethics Into Consideration; InfoQ, March 8, 2018

Ben Linders, InfoQ; 

"Most of the software that influences the behavior of human beings wasn’t created with strong ethical constructs around it. Software developers should ask themselves ethical questions like "who does this affect?", "who could get hurt by this?", and "who does this disadvantage or advantage?", try to answer them, and be comfortable with questions they can’t answer yet.

Theo Schlossnagle, CEO of Circonus, spoke about professional ethics for software developers atQCon London 2018. InfoQ is covering this conference with Q&As, presentations, summaries, and articles.

InfoQ interviewed Schlossnagle about the importance of ethics, what developers can do to incorporate ethical considerations, and asked him what the consequences of unethical software should be.

InfoQ: What makes ethics important for software developers?

Theo Schlossnagle: If you look around, the vast majority of people that are working today in our industry, writing code, making decisions that impact users, haven’t had an intense ethics course in their life. They haven’t taken an ethics course in high school, they haven’t taken an ethics course in college. It doesn’t mean that they don’t know ethics, ethics are pretty innate in human beings. There’s a playbook for discussing ethics; there’s a playbook for contemplating them; there’s not a playbook for answering them.The question is what your mental model is for making yourself answer those questions instead of just avoiding them and pretend they don’t exist.

We have 30 years of software development, and the last 10 to 15 of those have been hyper-accelerated software development. We have software all over the place that influences the behavior of human beings, and we didn’t create that software with strong ethical constructs around it."

Should software developers have a code of ethics?; CIO, 1/11/17

Sharon Florentine, CIO; 

Should software developers have a code of ethics? 

"While there are organization-- and company-specific codes of conduct -- like these guidelines from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers - Computer Science (IEEE-CS) joint task force on software engineering ethics professional practices, there's no one all-encompassing set of standards that includes the entire industry.

But maybe there should be...

Teaching people to ask the right questions involves understanding what the questions are, says Burton, and that everyone's values are different; some individuals have no problem working on software that runs nuclear reactors, or developing targeting systems for drones, or smart bombs, or military craft...

The questions should be around should it be built, what are the fail-safes, and what can we do to make sure we're having the least harmful impact we can?" he says.

There's no one "right answer" here, and a code of ethics certainly won't put all the ethical issues to rest. But it could be a good place to start if individuals and organizations want to harness the great power of technology to create solutions that serve the greater good."