1

Internet Ethics and Research Collaborations Between Industry and Universities

Michael C. Loui

Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering,

and Coordinated Science Laboratory

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

October 30, 2002

2

Some Ethical Issues in Research

Research misconduct Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism

Responsibility for error, negligence Authorship, acknowledgment of credit Sharing of research materials Human and animal subjects Conflicts of interest

3

How Does the Internet Affect Ethical Issues?

Global scale Whose standards apply?

Anonymity “Nobody knows you’re a dog”

Interaction Rapid communication between remote

users

4

How Does the Internet Affect Ethical Issues?

Reproducibility Perfect copies

Uncontrollability Who makes the rules?

5

Research Collaborations

Traditional relationship between industry and universities: Industry wants access to students and new

ideas, research with low overhead University wants dollars

Ideal relationship: mutually beneficial partnership

Confidentiality, intellectual property

6

Confidentiality

Academics want to publish Industrial researchers want to keep

proprietary information confidential Confidentiality as a professional

obligation

7

Privacy and Data Gathering via the Internet

Confidentiality of personal information Search engines Surveillance Cookies Data mining Informed consent

8

Intellectual Property and the Internet

Copyright Who owns software developed

cooperatively? Patent

Do software patents inhibit innovation? Should old paper-based intellectual

property mechanisms still apply?

9

Intellectual Property and Negotiated Agreements

“Sponsored research agreements shall provide that all intellectual property developed as a result of the sponsored research project shall belong to the University unless otherwise specified in writing. The sponsor may receive an option to license such resulting intellectual property on terms to be negotiated … The specific terms of licenses and rights to commercial development shall be based on negotiation between the sponsor and the University … The University may also determine, on a case-by-case basis, that it is in the university’s interest to assign ownership of resulting intellectual property to the sponsor as an exception to this policy when circumstances warrant such action …”

--Policy on Patents and Copyrights, University of Illinois, 1998

10

Summary

Confidentiality: When no laws apply, we need awareness

of special ethical obligations Intellectual Property:

When laws do apply, we need to decide whether intellectual property laws are ethically appropriate

11

Resources Edward F. Gehringer, Ethics in Computing,

http://www2.ncsu.edu:8010/eos/info/computer_ethics Duncan Langford, ed., Internet Ethics, St. Martin’s Press, New

York, 2000. Francis L. Macrina, Scientific Integrity, American Society for

Microbiology Press, Washington, D.C. 1995. Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science,

http://onlineethics.org Robin Levin Penslar, ed., Research Ethics: Cases and

Materials, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind., 1995. Richard A. Spinello and Herman T. Tavani, eds., Readings in

CyberEthics, Jones and Bartlett, Sudbury, Mass., 2001.