Download Construction of diagram highlighting moral claims

Running head: ETHICAL ISSUES
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Google Attempts to Fight Patent Trolls with a Pretty Dubious Strategy
[Name]
[Institutional Affiliation]
ETHICAL ISSUES
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Table of Contents
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 3
Construction of diagram highlighting moral claims ....................................................................... 4
Analysis and Explanation of the diagram and case ........................................................................ 4
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 7
References ....................................................................................................................................... 8
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Google Attempts to Fight Patent Trolls with a Pretty Dubious Strategy
Introduction
This paper is based on an ICR ethical issue highlighted in the media article ‘Google
Attempts to Fight Patent Trolls with a Pretty Dubious Strategy.’ The ethical issue in the
media article is about Intellectual property and copy rights. The initial part of the paper will
construct an argumentative mapping diagram which will highlight some of the ethical issues
raised from the media article. Once the argumentative map is constructed, a critical analysis with
detailed logical structure will be presented to support the ethical position claim. In the end,
conclusion will summarize the media article and will present the decision. The areas covered in
this essay are intellectual property, privacy issues and information rights. Ethics is all about
wrong and right, evil and good, vice and virtue etc. Ethics is related in the society based on
moral values and computer ethics is all about social and professional conduct in making moral
decisions in the field of IT.
The background of the case is that the legal team of Google in order to eliminate the
friction from the market of patents, they will buy as many patents as possible (Newitz, 2015).
This is done to defeat the trolls of patents for the corporations that are involved in buying patents
to sue the people on infringement bogus charges. But there is a big issue of ethics with this
strategy. The trolls on patents are known formally as ‘entities which are non-practicing.’
(Newitz, 2015) These are the companies which buy the intellectual property rights of other
companies and sell it to the companies that buy and license them. To put in simple words, NPEs
buy up other corporations patents and then establish programs of large legal terms which
‘protects’ their property if intellectual rights by suing inventions of others which appear to fall in
infringements (Newitz, 2015).
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Construction of diagram highlighting moral claims
Analysis and Explanation of the diagram and case
The laws regarding the tightening of intellectual property has been seen a steady incline
in the cultural and economic importance of the rights of intellectual property. The industry of
entertainment has long been dependent heavily on property of intellectual rights (Newitz, 2015).
Record companies and movie studios fortunes are linked closely with their ability to enforce on
their products the copyrights. Similar to that the companies in pharma have used the power of
monopoly to charge high prices and have patented their products which has allowed them to both
cover exorbitant costs of developing new drugs and making considerable income. Other
industries which are new have become dependent and equally on rights of intellectual property.
The distributors and developers of computer software for example, insist that their ability to
involve in business is dependent on their power to present the reproduction which is
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unauthorized in their creations (Newitz, 2015). The protection of intellectual property is widely
thought to be even more essential to the rapidly growing industry of biotechnology where the
new techniques development of new life forms and genetic engineering employs techniques
which are expensive. The firms of biotechnology argues that if there are not able to prevent the
rivals from copying their creations, their costs will not be able to recouped and thus would have
no incentive to invest in the development and research for scientific breakthroughs (Wright,
2011).
In regards to the media article, the owners of patents sell patents for various reasons. One
is the need to raise money. Unfortunately, the marketplace of patents is sometimes challenging
specially when there are smaller participants who end up working sometimes with patent trolls
then negative things like lots of wasted effort and lawsuits happen. This rarely gives the original
patent owner any meaningful benefit. So, in order to safeguard this Google has adopted a
strategy to protect these original patent owners against patent trolls (Ferrell & Fraedrich , 2014).
The distributors and developers of computer software for instance insists that their ability
to be in the business is to prevent the unauthorized reproduction of their innovations. Patent trolls
neglects their ability to prevent this (Newitz, 2015). Talking about copyrights, it is another form
of property of intellectual property which give the original work author for exclusive rights for a
specific period of time in regard to the work like distribution, adaptation and publication after
that time the work is said to fall in the domain of public. The application of copyrights to any
form which is expressive of an information or idea that is discrete, fixed and substantive in a
medium. Moral rights of some jurisdictions also recognize the creation of that work like the right
to credit the author of the work (Kennedy & Laczniak, 2014).
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The aspects of copyright may be transferred or assigned from one person to another. For
instance, a musician who records an album will mostly involve in a contract signing with the
record company in which the musician assets to transfer all the copyright in the recordings in
transfer for other considerations and royalties (Newitz, 2015). The original creator of holder of
copyrights benefits, from marketing and production capabilities. In the music and digital age,
music can be distributed and copied at a cost which is minimal with the help of internet. If this is
done illegally, then the process is known as digital piracy. This is one of the major ethical issues
highlighted in the case and patent trolls allows this to be possible (Newitz, 2015).
In the past few years, the industry of music has been dealing with this ethical challenge of
copyrighting as it pertains the songs downloading without the owner’s compensation who hold
the original material and copyrights (Newitz, 2015). Using another artist’s material is unethical
and music industry is losing millions from the free download material and due to patent trolls. It
has been stated by critics that more protection of copyright is provide by a handful of
corporations which severely hinders the digital age creativity. The strengthening of copyrights
protection for a handful of corporations will greatly impact the digital age (Ferrell & Fraedrich ,
2014).
Within the industry of music, from executive to songwriters, there is a copyright law
misunderstanding and its importance on their careers. There is a misconception regarding the
basic law aspects. As instance for the law will be to allow people to control their ideas which as
per copyright law is wrong and only safeguard the ways in which ideas are expressed and not the
original idea (Swatman, 2012). This is an argument of basic judgement for those who regards
music to be burned and downloaded without the protection of copyrights. The NPEs highlighted
in this media article, selling patent trolls make this possible (Ferrell & Fraedrich , 2014). So,
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seeing the copyright protection ethics from various perspectives in regards to protection of the
original owner’s innovations, it is clear that the corporations involved in patent trolls benefit
from this. Any purchase Google does from this patent trolls program is included in their portfolio
can Google use these patents in normal ways like licensing others, which is unethical. So, this
program of patent trolls is to quickly buy a lot of patents from the businesses that are small and
may have not the resources to sell those to non-trolls. It is not an effort done by Google to defeat
the patent trolls but is more like an effort to compete with them.
Conclusion
To sum up, there is a conflict between access to information and rights of intellectual
property which can lead to a better society (Ferrell & Fraedrich , 2014). While there are always
gray areas regarding the decisions of ethics surrounding the property of intellectual rights,
corporations today are levering their power so that there is no debate left on the subject.
However, societies in regards to the property of intellectual rights issues must speak with them,
otherwise corporations will keep on continuing these unethical practices.
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References
Ferrell, O. C., & Fraedrich, J. (2014). Business ethics: Ethical decision making & cases. Cengage
learning.
Kennedy, A. M., & Laczniak, G. R. (2014). Indigenous intellectual property rights: Ethical
insights for marketers. Australasian Marketing Journal (AMJ),22(4), 307-313.
McMenemy, D., Poulter, A., & Burton, P. (2014). A Handbook of Ethical Practice: A practical
guide to dealing with ethical issues in information and library work. Elsevier.
Newitz, A. (2015). Google Attempts to Fight Patent Trolls with a Pretty Dubious
Strategy.Gizmodo. Retrieved 23 September 2015, from http://gizmodo.com/googleattempts-to-fight-patent-trolls-by-buying-pat-1700413270
Swatman, P. (2012). Ethical issues in social networking research. In Seminar presentation.
Wright, D. (2011). A framework for the ethical impact assessment of information
technology. Ethics and information technology, 13(3), 199-226.