Creative Commons licenses can be implemented to help use media legally, technically and socially by abiding by the Copyright laws and recognizing applied Creative Commons licenses on material that we want to add to our own work. Creative Commons licenses are free to copyright licenses that can be easily applied to say how you would like or how other creators would like their material used.
There are 6 creative commons licenses to choose from that all have different permissions assigned to them:
Creative Commons is a license that is useful if you do not want others to use your work without your permission and it also makes it easy to share your work without having to go through every request and allow permissions to everyone who wants to use.
Anything that I create is instantly protected by the copyright laws, I do not need to apply for copyright it is automatically assigned. Copyright has protections so that other people cannot use my work without my permission. This also stops any creation of new ideas based on old ideas. Which is an argument for another time?
Getting back on topic I assume we are talking about copyright because many students are about to start their projects in their final semester of the bachelor. We need to be aware that we can use other people’s works legally by abiding by the copyright laws.
Today we are learning about what morals and ethical behavior are and what it means personally to others in our class. Morals are of personal opinion what one person believes is acceptable may be unacceptable to someone else. This all depends on where in the world you live, your upbringing and shared beliefs by the people in your community. If there is no consensus among a community then no morals are started.
There are moral values that are accepted by the international community there are many but some are:
peace
freedom
social progress
equal rights
honoring agreements
There are some people that take on a profession such as medicine, law or accounting who are burdened with written codes of ethical responsibility that include:
confidentiality
duty of care
professional responsibilities
avoiding conflict of interest
That doesn’t mean to say that if there are no written codes of ethics they have no morals because with all professions there are usually professional ethics expected of all people in the business.
In class, we discussed the following questions and listened to people’s personal opinion on Ethics and Morals
If it is, why and how? Can you come up with a solution that would solve the ethical problem?
1. You find some good images on the web that would look good on your site. You copy and paste them to your blog.
This would be considered unethical, there is no problem with this as long you give credit to who took the photo
If you got them off a site that gives free images away then that is fine but! I would have to wonder if you started making money off the image then that would be considered immoral.
most content is protected by copyright laws and there are creative commons licenses that can be applied to ones work
2. You are in a hurry to finish an assignment and you find the perfect explanation of a difficult concept on Wikipedia. You decide to copy it into your work.
Well given credit where credit is due all Wikipedia is free to be copied, shared and adapted
To be blunt if one was to do this-this may not be ethical but if you are planning on referencing your academic paper with your findings from Wikipedia you run the risk of losing all credibility and your paper not worth the time and effort of your lecturer’s eyes.
3. You are a medical researcher and you think you have discovered a new drug that cures lung cancer. It worked well on mice although a few of them died of heart problems. You want to test it on people. You recruit 100 lung cancer patients in your treatment program. You don’t tell them about the new drug. You treat 50 patients with usual drugs and 50 with the new drug to see which is better.
Well to start, good luck getting this off the ground!
Unethical is the whole question – imagine treating 50 patients with the usual drug and 50 with the potential cure. Studies that have been performed on mice and a few of them died!
Additionally, you need to gain consent and supply the possible sided effects that being death.
4. You are doing your Ph.D. about drug abuse among students. You interview 30 students about their drug use. You discover that one of the students is actually a fairly big-time dealer and you report him to the police.
Haha well, the drug dealer does not appear too bright to let it be known he is a big-time dealer, he should have lied in the interview questions. Is he dealing in something harmless like marijuana or the serious stuff? Ethically one would like to say they should report this to the police but morally it does not sit right and not knowing the extent of the situation. There could also be repercussions if you are discovered the nark.
If he is big time then it would be highly possible there are drug users in the class, therefore, they are now breaking the law.
What do you do… nothing.
5. You are a researcher looking at the effect of violent computer games on children. You recruit 20 children into your study. Over a month you regularly show them images of violence to see if it has an adverse effect on their behavior. One of the children becomes quite distressed each time and so you stop showing her images and drop her from the study.
WOW an interesting scenario but completely unethical
Intentionally showing 20 kids violent content in this way is disturbing and the girl who is dropped from the study because she is distressed from viewing violent images does this distress stop straight away… no, it does not
There is so much violence our children witness every day that a study of this nature can be performed differently.
6. You want to research how easy it is to hack into your organization’s computer system by persuading people to divulge login and password details. You recruit a small team to ring up key people in the organization and persuade them to give either their own or their boss’s details.
Well to start you actually have to warn your staff that this is going to happen because they would potentially be giving their passwords away with confidential information at risk, a form of social engineering is taking place here.
What’s funny that even with the forewarning that this may happen, it is surprising how many people will still give their password out to a stranger over the phone
Unethical
7. You are doing initial research in an area of a town where may bars and pubs are located, to estimate the level of problematic social behavior in the area. Your research is independent of the police because you want to observe their behavior as well. You observe both abusive and violent behavior.
Well, this is also unethical to do this kind of research because there is no consent given by anyone to be observed but! by gaining consent invalidates the research because people act differently knowing they are being observed
Even though one is observing this could pose a problem, what if you just witnessed a serious violent act and did nothing to report it.
Below is a YouTube that one might find interesting. Here we are observing a man who believes he is executing electric shock therapy to another human. He is informed to amplify the treatments in the name of science, even though it is loudly obvious the treated is in distress.
Buzz NMIT 