Lecture 12th October 2009

Lecture today was talked about Legal & Ethical. Law is a rule of conduct or action prescribed or formally recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority. Law implies imposition by a sovereign authority and the obligation of obedience on the part of all subject to that authority. Ethics is a set of moral principles or values, the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group. Besides that, ethics is an objectively defined standard of right and wrong. The categories of law are civil law, criminal law, tort law. The categories of laws that affect the individual in the workplace are private law and public law.

The differences between laws and ethics are as below:-

LAW	ETHIC
Interpreted by courts	Described by unwritten principles
Established by legislature representing everyone	Interpreted by individuals
Applicable to everyone	Presented by philosophers, religions, professional group.
Priority determined by courts if two laws conflict	Personal choice
Enforceable by police and courts	Priority determined b individual if two principles conflict.
Formal, documented

Ethics concepts in information security are ethical differences across cultures, software license infringement, illicit use, misuse of corporate resources, ethics and education, deterrence to unethical and illegal behavior, three general categories of unethical and illegal behavior which are ignorance, accident, and intent, deterrence is also an ethics concept in information security.

There are three common used ways to provide protections by laws which are copyright, patent, trade secret. Copyrights is designed to protect the expression of ideas, applies to a creative work such as a story and song, intended to allow regular and free exchange of ideas, must apply to an original work and it must be in some tangible medium of expression, to cover works in the arts, literature and written scholarship. Besides that, Patents applies to the result of science, technology and engineering. Patent can protect a “new and useful process, machine, manufacture or composition of matter”, designed to protect the device or process for carrying out an idea, not the idea itself. Moreover, Trade Secret must be kept a secret. The owner must protect the secret by any means, such as by storing it in a safe, encrypting it and by making employees sign a statement that they will not disclose the secret. Trade secret protection can also vanish through reverse engineering.

Rights of employees and employers are ownership of a patent, ownership of a copyright, work for hire, licenses, trade secret protection, and employment contracts. A computer can be attacked, used to attack, and used as a means to commit crime. Computer crime is hard to prosecute because low computer literacy (lack of understanding), no physical clues (lack of physical evidence), intangible forms of assets, considered as juvenile crime, lack of political impact.

In this lecture, Mr Zaki gave us an assignment about the cyber laws. So, we need to finish our assignment and present when next week.