User:Nick Baratta/sandbox

Article Summary
I am summarizing the article Information ethics. This article discusses the ethics, and history behind the sharing, securing of, and privacy behind information, and how we as humans interact with such information.

This articles main objectives set to outline the basic history and generic ethics topics discussing information. Such things include the ethics of piracy, censorship of information, how medical records are treated from an ethics standpoint, and how information ethics have shaped the international security of the States, citing the attacks of 9/11, the 2001 PATRIOT act, and the effects from it.

The most detailed results to come out of this article discuss the history of the subject. It outlines the beginnings of the subject, as the Internet became larger around the '80s and information became more valuable. It also discusses how vague "information" is and how talks about ethics are extremely vague, and deal with "many diverse domains."

Another detailed section is the Censorship and Downloading Ethics sections. As censorship has been around way longer than technology such as the Internet has been around, it has been more of a discussed topic. Censorship is deemed unethical by some as it prevents information from being spread, which, even when harmful, is necessary, to some. Downloading ethics is a similar topic, where some believe it is ethical by principle, but people in power have historically fought against it for their own benefit.

Finally, it talks about how ethical concerns regarding surveillance and privacy are increasingly rising. As information becomes more expensive to maintain and becomes more valuable to us as society, it becomes "easier" to justify such intense surveillance in our world. Not all agree with this though, and the ethics of surveillance is still a heated debate topic to this day.

Literature Review

 * 1) The title of my article is Information Ethics.
 * 2) The key ideas of this article are a history of the topic, the future of the topic, and the current issues surrounding the topic.
 * 3) The main problems addressed are that Information ethics have had a rather short, but highly debated topics. Such things include privacy concerns, medical records, national security, and the like.
 * 4) This topic is worth undertaking because of how relative Information (in the context of this subject) is highly important and is currently shaping history/the world around us. Our information is everywhere, and it is becoming more expensive to protect, expensive to procure, and more important to potential threats.
 * 5) The technological standpoints vary, but are still the focus. The technological standpoints mainly revolve around the collection and interpretation of information, that being stored in medical offices, with governments, how it should be stored, how it should be recorded, what tools should record information for us, and the like.
 * 6) The ethical standpoints talk about how vague "information" is, and how defining it proves quite a difficult process and can result in a lot of political issues alongside privacy issues. Some bodies of people are debated to not need access to some information, and vice versa.
 * 7) The societal standpoints of this topic are how people's information is treated in the world. If data collection, surveillance, and the like are deemed ethical, than our society would become much more monitored and we would have a much less private life.
 * 8) The audience I find influenced from this article are the audience of people that do not collect other peoples info, and usually are the same people that have their information collected, are people who experience surveillance, and who probably would not want any of those things.

Assignment 8
Nick Baratta peer reviewed Drew Carver's article.

Assignment 9
As I did not receive a peer review, and also did not submit anything for Week 7 as I thought I was on spring break, I will do an abridged version of that here for Assignment 9.

In the "Ethics of Downloading" section, I think it should be expanded a bit more. Currently it only talks about downloading illegal copies of protected materials, and doesn't talk much on torrents or piracy of video games, which, while they fall under the same umbrella, affects the industry more severely than the bigger industries like TV or music. The effects video game piracy has on the industry is so much more spread out, and it matters much more since video games generally generate income largely based on sales numbers. Pirating a video game directly impacts the developers and publishers who made it, whereas pirating TV or music can hurt brands and large corporations in a much more minor way, due to the scale of it all.

However, this claim is debated. Some views of piracy and torrenting differ greatly, and some studies have said the opposite, that video game piracy has no effect on the industry, as pirated copies were never potential sales in the first place. And as time goes on, as video games go under the control of bigger corporations, this begins to matter less. On top of this, video games, as an industry, are growing very quickly and piracy is having an increasingly diminished effect, and that pirating games might actually, in some cases, be good. This may actually increase interest due to people being able to enjoy and play a game that they otherwise would not have due to the price. This can help grow a smaller companies fame, and garner more interest in actual paying customers.

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