Information Technology Ethics Impeding the Digital Revolution

Question: Discuss about the Information Technology Ethics of Impeding the Digital Revolution. Answer: Introduction E-commerce to online games, streaming live videos, the Internet is used by a large amount of people. A global audience can access the internet as it is emerging as the pool of information. All this information is accessible for a person if he/she posses a telephone line or a personal computer. It also works as a medium of knowledge sharing. Now days it is seen that the internet is used as the weapon of different deceptive practices that can create confusion in public and try to take advantage of reputation and goodwill of a well-known and successful organization. This kind of deceptive practices comes under the umbrella term cyber piracy. This essay contributes to the different deceptive practices like cyber squatting, domain parking, deceptive ad-words and the effects on the users privacy, security, intellectual property, regulations on the internet, community, and on the convergent computing. The scenario: The cyber piracy is an umbrella term that covers different deceptive practices like Cybersquating: This term is used to describe the registration over a domain name that is not for taking. By doing this the cyber squatter asks the organization or the person whose name or trademarks are contained in the domain name. After this, the cyber squatter tries to extort the victimized person or the organization, and asks money. The claimed money is much greater than the purchasing value. Often the cyber squatters wait so that, a registered domain name expires, after this they register and place humiliating information on the site (Wright, 2012). This is done to encourage the effort of selling the domain to the targeted person or the victimized organization. The example of such cybersquatting incident happened with the Arkansas legal services (https://lsntap.org). The company registered different variations of their website address including www.arlegalservices.com. This domain expired in early 2006, after which in a week a cyber squatter was using the URL for wrong reasonsan d advertised that the URL is for sell. Domain parking: The domain parking is another sophisticated version of the cyber squatting. In domain parking, it takes the advantage of the type-in issue of the user. In this case, a fake website is created that displays contents similar to the original site (Alrwais et al., 2014). This fake websites has some advertisers link. When the links are clicked the user are redirected to the advertisers page. For this, the domain holder gets fees. Often some domain parkers try to sell this similar kind of fake websites. Deceptive Ad-words: Another form of the cyber piracy is the deceptive ad-words that ,are a result of false advertising and ambiguous trade practices. The search engine giants like Google, Yahoo sales ad words to the organizations. Using this ad words the organizations can sell their products on this websites. When a user searches for such words the engine promptly displays the sites that have purchased the particular ad word. Framing: In cyber piracy, the framing can be described as using the content of website in another website without permission or without giving proper credit. Illegal distribution of the software and copyright material: Another form of the cyber piracy is illegal and unauthorized distribution of the software and copyright materials ( Filby, 2013). Using Torrents and other peer-to-peer file sharing services the software and copyright materials are shared over the internet. The stakeholders By the different methods of cyber piracy the owners of the intellectual property ,well known organizations, the well known personalities are victimized and are victimized by the attackers or the hackers. As the cyber, crime is growing day by day and is an industry of 220bn-340bn, which is more than the national income of most of the countries in the world. As an example, the domain name of Google was sold to a person named Sanmay Ved. Although that is for minute the domain was the property of him. Ethical issues Buying the names and keywords are legal, but this is not ethical. Since the the purchase of the domain name can be a step to sabotage the other company(Lau Yuen ,2014). By registering the hostname a that have the keywords which belongs to the other companies or organization can give the permission to do anything with that, but the practically hold the key words or the domain as the hostages. In addition, framing is unethical too. Since there is no proper, credit is given to the intellectual property of the content on the website. Non ethical issues In case of domain parking, it takes advantage of the inexperience of the end users. In this case, the user follows the provided advertisers link and consequently the owner of the site gets the fees or the payment from the advertisers as they provide visitors to the advertisements( Yoon, 2012). Consequences Due to cyber squatting the organizations, celebrity personalities can be harmed due to the offensive use of the domain names. While trying to extort the victim organizations or the person they destroy the reputation and the goodwill in the society(Larsson,2013). Ethical analysis Consequentialism: the theory of consequentialism can be defined as dealing with the consequences rather than the actions itself. According to this theory, it can be stated that the stealing is good if the outcome is for the good (Boyte ,2014). Here for example if we take that in a kingdom a king has stored his warehouses when maximum of the people in the state is starving. Here the stealing of the food to distribute in the people is good. Since the outcome is good. In this case when the softwares, eBooks are priced too high then the cyber squatters, parkers try to prove that when specifically no one is harmed and the knowledge and services are distributed between the people. Therefore, according to them, the information should be free and for the distribution of the software the loss incurred to the organization is insignificant or it can be easily defended. Just consequentialism The traditional consequentialism has some well-known shortcomings. Like it is insensitive to the issues of justice. But in case of the just consequentialism it proposes the use of information or the content without harming interest of the actual owner of the content or the data. Conclusion As the information accessed by through the internet is increasing day by day, therefore the issues with the cyber securities will also increase. To stop these cybercrimes or the cybercriminals, its necessary to introduce new laws against the different cyber crimes. Again as the kind of the cybercrimes in different regions of the world are also different so there should be rules that resembles with each other and can protect different intellectual properties and the ownership of the content on the internet. References Alrwais, S., Yuan, K., Alowaisheq, E., Li, Z., Wang, X. (2014). Understanding the dark side of domain parking. In23rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 14)(pp. 207-222). Boyte, A. N. (2014). Finding Copyright's Core Content.University of St. Thomas Law Journal,10(3), 9. Center for Arkansas Legal Services | LSNTAP. (2016).Lsntap.org. Retrieved 28 May 2016, from https://lsntap.org/node/2028 Filby, M. R. (2013).Cyber Piracy: Can File Sharing be Regulated without Impeding the Digital Revolution?(Doctoral dissertation, University of Leicester). Larsson, S., Svensson, M., De Kaminski, M. (2013). Online piracy, anonymity and social change Innovation through deviance.Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies,19(1), 95-114. Lau, W. W., Yuen, A. H. (2014). Internet ethics of adolescents: Understanding demographic differences.Computers Education,72, 378-385. Wright, S. (2012). Cybersquatting at the Intersection of Internet Domain Names and Trademark Law.Communications Surveys Tutorials, IEEE,14(1), 193-205. Yoon, C. (2012). Digital piracy intention: a comparison of theoretical models.Behaviour Information Technology,31(6), 565-576.