"Information Ethics" is a broad term that emerged over the last fifteen years
as a way to describe specific ethical issues surrounding the use of online information.
The use of the word "information" here is problematic, as it is hard to think of a poem or work of
art on the same level as the definition of a black hole, a train schedule, or computer software,
but for this
discussion, "information" refers to all of those things. Broadly, information ethics
refers to privacy concerns, internet commerce, and censorship, but the elements of the information ethics
debate that most concern students on a college
campus are the issues of plagiarism and "fair use" of intellectual property.
Most students understand that submitting to a
professor a research paper that they did not write is
plagiarism, and most
students also know that lifting a sentence from an article, book, or web page,
and placing it in a research paper without citing where it came from, is
plagiarism. But students also need to understand the finer points of information ethics,
such as copying another writer's style,
using copyrighted material, "public domain" or "common" knowledge, and fair use. This workshop attempts
to clarify some of these issues.
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