Prompt: You should answer in more depth and detail the question we started talking about in class on Monday, using examples from the videos we've seen and from your own experience, and connecting the examples to quotations from the readings: what are the most important "harms" that you, personally, see facing the ways intellectual property operating today, and how are those different from or similar to the harms faced by previous generations?
In class on monday my group was faced with the question of what types of sharing that wsu students and staff currently engage in, and what types are the legal, economic, and ethical implications of doing so? My group came up with tons of ideas. Economic problems that staff and students contribute to are the use of libraries because the school has to pay for the use of articles and books and allowing students and staff free access to the books. Other types of books that can cause economic problems would be textbooks because students either find ways of getting the books by sharing or they sell their books for prices well below the market value which means that the publisher is losing money. Some legal issues that students and staff have is with file sharing because some students use this and it is illegal because of copyright laws. Students and staff also face the problems with making sure that they cite their sources and also cite all the types of things they use in their works if they don't it is either plagiarism or copyright, having either of these happen can cause major legal problems for the person using the source. Some ethical implications our group came up with was that old tests and papers that students keep a collection of a give to other students to help with tests or papers. These types of things have ethical and economic implications. The ethical implications are the integrity of the student using old tests to cheat or old papers to cheat, the student will have their own conscience guiding them and telling them what is right and what is wrong. The economic implications of tests and papers that are being recycled means that the money that you pay for the class but you cheating yourself out of the money you are paying for the class.
It's interesting to consider the relationship between weaseling your way to get cheaper textbooks and receiving old tests and papers. Personally I would argue that those who use other's old work are cheating their way out of properly absorbing material themselves as opposed to those who do the work themselves. But I have never considered the effect of searching for cheaper textbooks. Technically, it's the companies that are being cheated out of the money they would have made. As a student, I say "to hell with it" and always look for the cheapest option to maximize the output (learning information) for my (discounted) input. No matter the framework, it seems that all of the loopholes for obtaining information, somebody is being cheated.
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