New Media and Ethics PDF

New Media and Ethics If you buy a song from iTunes, should you be able to play it on any device you wish? Should ideas or knowledge that can lead to positive change for many people (like an approach to international conflict mediation or a scientific discovery that could lead to a new lifesaving med...

New Media and Ethics If you buy a song from iTunes, should you be able to play it on any device you wish? Should ideas or knowledge that can lead to positive change for many people (like an approach to international conflict mediation or a scientific discovery that could lead to a new lifesaving medication) be protected and kept from the public through intellectual property laws? How much information and creative works should be available in the public domain to help further knowledge and inspire further innovation and creativity, and how much of that should be protected? These questions aren’t easy to answer, and many answers spark controversy as they bring up issues of censorship and information control. In recent years lawmakers, law enforcers, and media companies have taken more steps to deter and/or prosecute people who violate copyright laws. © Thinkstock Censorship, which is the suppression, limiting, or deleting of speech, is an issue that predates the advent of mass media and new media, but one that has become more prevalent as the amount, access to, and diversity of information has increased. Censorship is based on the notion of freedom of speech, which is a foundational principle of the U.S. Constitution and was declared a universal human right by the United Nations. I have chosen to discuss censorship in the section on new media because the internet, which is the basis for most new media, has been envisioned as an avenue toward, and an outlet for, more free speech. Censorship is enacted and free speech limited in two primary ways on the internet: through intellectual property rights and copyrights and through content filtering by governments or other entities. Intellectual Property Rights and Copyrights As we learned earlier, one of the technological changes that made the birth and explosion of new media possible is the near-universal compatibility of digital content. This, along with the absence of a physical object onto which media content is coded (a DVD instead of a digital file on a computer or other device) has created issues with increased piracy The unlawful reproduction and/or distribution of intellectual property or other copyrighted material. , which refers to the unlawful reproduction and/or distribution of intellectual property or other copyrighted material. This problem gained much attention following the mass popularity of the peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program Napster. Despite the numerous lawsuits and legal challenges that Napster faced, P2P file-sharing programs like Limewire, Vuze, and bitTorrent became the new way to legally and illegally share files ranging from software to video games, documents, books, music, and movies. Once anything is digitized and makes its way to one of these networks, it becomes nearly impossible to control or limit its circulation. For example, media corporations, law enforcement, and government agencies have tried to prosecute individuals, require internet service providers to take action against users who illegally download materials or visit suspect sites, or shut down domain names based in the United States. None of these measures have been very effective, especially for sites based outside of the United States, but a renewed effort on the part of interest groups that represent the entertainment industry led to the introduction of two pieces of legislation that stirred up quite a backlash. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) were introduced in the House of Representatives and the Senate in order to make it more difficult for sites, in the United States and abroad, to distribute pirated copyrighted materials ranging from movies, to music, and digital books. Although many people applaud the effort to stop the circulation of pirated material, many were also afraid that the regulations could lead to restrictions on other forms of information circulation, such as open-source sharing and crowdsourcing. To protest and raise awareness of these laws, several high-profile sites and hundreds of other online supporters engaged in the largest act of cyberprotest to date. On January 18, 2012, sites like Wikipedia, Google, and Craigslist “went black,” limited content, or displayed information about SOPA and PIPA. Within a few days, support for the laws had dwindled, and both are now on indefinite hold. Corporations and universities have expanded the need for more intellectual property laws in order to protect their products, which now extend beyond physical objects to include concepts, formulas, algorithms, and computer codes, among others, from being hacked. © Shutterstock Most new media scholars and commentators do not question the fact that some information should be protected as intellectual property and that many artistic creations should be copyrighted. Such practices help ensure that innovation and creativity are recognized and that the people who create them are duly compensated. These protections actually help promote and protect freedom of speech and provide an incentive for people to expend considerable time and effort to produce innovative and creative products and exchange ideas and art that circulate in and enhance our society. Intellectual property rights and protections are newer and more difficult to enforce and even define than are copyrights. After all, putting protections on “knowledge” or “information” is more ambiguous than putting a copyright on a discrete item like a book or song. In the realm of academia, especially, the philosophy of open and shared knowledge has been applied to academic research and scholarship. Ideas and findings are free to circulate and be used and adapted (with the proper citation and/or credit given) in order to further knowledge and provide a system of transparency and accountability. Corporations and companies have long had a more closed policy to knowledge and information, keeping many product ideas and designs to themselves and considering them proprietary information. Such practices, including issuing patents for inventions or considering certain information confidential, help keep individuals and businesses striving for better and/or more competitive products or ideas. The increase in corporate-like application of such protections to intellectual property in academia and other scientific areas that were historically more open and collaborative has received much criticism. To reiterate, these issues exist independently of new media, but the fact that most ideas and creations are now in digital form and that the internet provides for sharing and then rapid and uncontrollable diffusion of such material is what creates the issue relevant to our discussion. And the issue of enforcement is what brings us back to the notion and ethics of censorship. One way such protections have been enforced is by actually building new codes directly into the content or technology, which prevents them from being opened or shared outside of their protected and restricted environment. Again, this alone isn’t enough to constitute an ethical violation. But one media scholar and critic sums up the oppositional view of such practices in the following statement: “Many believe the restrictions are leading to the suffocation of works in the public domain for scholarship and a wholesale erosion of the global commons of information.” The main criticism in terms of infringement on intellectual work rests on the increase in copyrights and intellectual property laws on the circulation of academic findings and publications. The internet is seen by many as a tool to enhance academic research and sharing and as a place for collaboration, but such laws have limited or shut down some academic databases and the circulation of electronic journals and articles. The main criticism in terms of infringement on creative works rests on the loss of revenue for artists, authors, and musicians whose works are pirated and losses for their representatives, such as distributors, record labels, or movie studios. Since piracy, which is the illegal or unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted product, hasn’t been successfully curtailed through threats of prosecution, the codes that I mentioned earlier have become the new means of protection. This practice, called digital rights management (DRM) Practice that involves embedding device- or program-specific codes into a digital product that limit its ability to be reproduced and/or used on multiple devices. , involves embedding device- or program-specific codes into a digital product that limit its ability to be reproduced and/or used on multiple devices. DRM has raised much concern and controversy. I’m sure we’ve all been frustrated that we can’t get a song we downloaded from iTunes to play on a “nonapproved device” or experienced the annoying unintended effects of DRM. Even though that content belongs to us and we bought it legally, we are not able to take advantage of the portability and cross-platform compatibility that we learned earlier is so characteristic of new media. The use of these codes is critiqued because they limit choice for those who legally and/or rightfully purchased the content and because they lead to a dependency on certain companies (usually large, powerful ones) like Microsoft or Apple, which can limit the ability of people, especially those who are already marginalized in terms of socioeconomic status, to access and use certain technology or products. Content Filtering and Surveillance Research shows that internet content filtering is increasing as new technologies allow governments and other entities to effectively target and block internet users from accessing undesirable information. For example, in 2002, only two countries, China and Saudi Arabia, were known to actively filter internet content within their borders. Presently, many more countries, including the United States, engage in such content filtering. Content filtering can happen at different levels. Filtering or blocking can happen at the internet backbone level, which is the method most often used to limit information at the national level. In such cases, content is filtered out at an infrastructure or gateway point before it ever enters the country. Internet service providers can also block or censor content at the request of governments or other groups. Institutions can block certain content using software or other technical means. This type of blocking may be carried out to meet the objectives or values of a particular institution—for example, to block sexually-explicit information from school computers. Finally, censorship can occur at the individual computer level. In such cases, parents or others may want to control the information available with customizable filtering software. While it is difficult to control what individuals put on the internet, it is possible to block certain content at the “backbone” level of the internet. © Thinkstock Typically, blocked content includes pornography or other materials deemed sexually explicit, information deemed harmful to national security or public safety (e.g., bomb-making information), and information that challenges a government or regime’s power. In 2009, Bahrain was reported to make the most substantial increase in filtering of any country, as it limited many social, religious, political, and human-rights sites. In terms of politics and human-rights blocking, China blocked access to Twitter in the lead-up to the twenty-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. Saudi Arabia has taken a more targeted approach by blocking the accounts of two prominent human rights activists. Religiously offensive material can also be blocked as evidenced by Pakistan’s practice of blocking information that is offensive to Islam. The “Getting Critical” feature explores in more detail the often-controversial practice of censorship for religious reasons. Getting Critical YouTube and Free Speech: Should Religiously Offensive Material Be Blocked? The issue of censoring information deemed to be religiously offensive gained worldwide attention in September 2012 when a video trailer for an anti-Islamic movie made in the United States made its way onto YouTube, which sparked protests in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Tunisia, Indonesia, Iraq, Lebanon, and many other countries. In response to calls from some of these countries for the United States to remove the video from YouTube, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the video but affirmed that the video is protected under the right to free speech promised by the U.S. Constitution. Google, which owns YouTube, also stated that the video doesn’t violate U.S. law or Google’s terms of service and would therefore not be removed in the United States. Google did make the unprecedented decision, in the wake of an attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya that killed four Americans including ambassador Chris Stevens and in the face of increasing protests, to block the video in Libya, Egypt, Indonesia, and India. 1. Should the United States have completely removed the video from YouTube in the wake of the protests and violence it sparked around the world? Why or why not? 2. Discuss Google/YouTube’s decision to block the video in several countries. Do you think this was the right or wrong decision on the part of the company? 3. Review YouTube’s “Community Guidelines,” which can be accessed at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines. In your opinion, should anything be removed from or added to these guidelines? To further limit information, some governments also block access to foreign news or information from human rights organizations. Blocking software can now also limit access to translation sites, which a person could use to get around the filtering, since most of the information that is blocked is in the native language(s) of the country. This was the case in Bahrain, which blocked access to Google Translate in 2009. Web access can also be limited due to security reasons. In 2009, the U.S. Marines announced that soldiers would no longer have access to social media networks because they can lead to cyberattacks or allow people to leak information. Some of the major critiques of this practice include the collusion of corporations who own certain internet platforms with governments that block content. For example, a company could turn over, at the request of a government, logs or archives of information about the internet use of a dissident. At the request of the Chinese government, Yahoo! turned over email records of three people, which led to their arrest. Additionally, people have raised concerns about the fact that U.S. companies supply many of these countries, with whom the United States doesn’t have a relationship or with whom relations are strained, with the software that is then used in ways that go against U.S. and U.N. policies for the protection of free speech and human rights. Electronic espionage has been around since communication technologies like the telegraph, sound-recording devices, and radios were invented. Many countries, including the United States, have long had limitations on, and protections against, the use of electronic surveillance on U.S. citizens, but after 9/11, these restrictions have been lessened, loosely interpreted, or only selectively enforced. With new media come new opportunities for electronic surveillance. Internet-based “wiretaps”—the unauthorized and unknown monitoring or collection of email, web-surfing data, or even keyboard strokes—are now employed, and that information may be shared with law enforcement or intelligence agencies. Such surveillance techniques are not just used by government or intelligence agencies; they are also used by companies. If you’re like many others and me, you are now used to clicking “accept” on those lengthy terms-of-use agreements and privacy policies without looking at them. What we may not know (and may not care about) is that who or whatever is asking us for our agreement or disagreement may want to track our usage of their program or product. Sometimes this tracking is meant to improve the functionality of the product or to connect us with services that we or the program has identified as useful to or relevant for us. The amount of data that exists on each one of us is now astounding, and more web users are demanding that browsers and other internet services allow them to either opt out of tracking or monitor who is tracking them. A recent “add-on” called Lightbeam for Mozilla’s Firefox has received attention for allowing users to visualize who is tracking them in real time.