Essential Knowledge

• IOC-1.F.1 Material created on a computer is the intellectual property of the creator or an organization.
• IOC-1.F.2 Ease of access and distribution of digitized information raises intellectual property concerns regarding ownership, value, and use.
• IOC-1.F.3 Measures should be taken to safeguard intellectual property.
• IOC-1.F.4 The use of material created by someone else without permission and presented as one’s own is plagiarism and may have legal consequences.
• IOC-1.F.6 The use of material created by someone other than you should always be cited.
• IOC-1.F.7 Creative Commons, open source, and open access have enabled broad access to digital information.
• IOC-1.F.8 As with any technology or medium, using computing to harm individuals or groups of people raises legal and ethical concerns.
• IOC-1.F.9 Computing can play a role in social and political issues, which in turn often raises legal and ethical concerns.

What is intellectual property?

Intellectual property is a work or invention that is the result of creativity, to which one has rights over.

In the modernized world today, intellectual property can be shared more easily now through the Internet. This raises concerns about who owns something that was created digitally.

Copyright

Copyright protects your IP and keeps anyone else from using it, unless they have permission. Anything you create like a picture u took or a digital drawing, you automatically own an “All rights reserved” copyright. If we pretend that material is our own then it becomes plagiarism

There are ways to create material for others to use:

Creative Commons

• Provides free licenses that you can use to tell others how you want them to use your creation
• Examples: If you draw a picture and you want other people to use and distribute it without asking for permission. If you have a song that you want to freely share
• It clearly outlines whether certain people can use it for creative commons, whether it’s commercial or for another reason

Open Source

• Are open for anyone to use and the IP can modified in whatever ways people want, thus encouraging open collaboration
• Refers exclusively to software

Open Access

• Online research output free of any restrictions (like copyright or licesnse restrictions) and free of use so people can use this however they wish
• Example: Open access databases with journals and research papers for others to reference and use

Popcorn Hack 1

• Give an example of an open source software and explain why it is an open source.

A - The browser Firefox is fully open-source. Mozilla has stated that this improves customer choice and innovation in the browser market.

Legal/Ethical Concerns

No matter how you use something, it’s still important to cite information and give credit where it belongs. There is so information at our fingertips and though open source programs may be created with good intentions, people will sometimes use these open sources and modify them to harm individuals or groups.

There are legal concerns regarding computing devices that collect and analyze data by monitoring individual activity. Digital media downloads can sometimes include viruses and harmful programs

Digital Divide and Bias

Some softwares may include algorithms with bias. The training data for the software might underrepresent certain groups or demographics. Lack of fairness in algorithmic decision-making can perpetuate societal inequalities.

The digital divide is the unequal distribution of access to technology Although the Internet provides all these resources for us to use, certain groups of people do not have the technology readily available for them to use. These databases and online resources are only beneficial to those who have the opportunities and privileges to understand and access technology.

Popcorn Hack 2

• What is another legal or ethical concern regarding intellectual property in technology?

A - Another ethical concern for intellectual property is the discussion surrounding dataset harvesting for LLMs and other modern AI systems. Some creators whose work has been used for LLM training without their own permission have raised complaints of IP/copyright violations and plagiarism, while others have sought to prevent theirs from being used.

Homework

Complete these five free response questions and send them to Taj on slack by December 21, 11:59 pm. You will be graded on how much effort you put into your answer.

1. What is the difference between open source and open access?

2. What is the importance of copyright?

3. What is a way people can harm individuals or groups through open source data?

4. What term describes the uequal distribution of access to technology?

5. How do you see intellectual property in 20 years (be creative)?

• Open source is when the code of the application can be found and downloaded by anyone, such as with Python packages. Open access is when the output of the software is free to use, but the internals are not available for editing, such as Google (you can use Google for free but cannot modify its code). Open access may also refer to various non-code IPs that are freely available, like open-access databases (NASA Exoplanet Archive, NIH PubMed) or publications (Astronomy & Astrophysics, Proceedings of the Royal Society).

• Copyright prevents others from taking work that you created and passing it off as their own or using it for finanical gain without compensating you for creating it.

• Open source programs may be modified to become malicious, either by inserting malicious code or by misusing open-source code for malicious means. For instance, you could use open-source LLM code to synthesize large quantities of misinformation that you then spread online.

• The Digital Divide refers to some groups being underrepresented online, usually because they lack financial access to digital devices or Internet.

• Assuming we didn’t blow ourselves up, continued advancement of database-trained AI and increasing difficulty of tracking down sources online will probably make source verification and IP protection much more important than today. Within that time we may get to a state where there is so much LLM-generated garbage out there that we have to rely on vetted organizational IPs, be they open-access or not (seriously, trying to get anything cutting-edge out of ChatGPT is a fool’s errand.). Susceptibility of open-access to plaigarism in such an environment may also reduce its importance.