CSE 303, Autumn 2009
Ethics/Social Implications of Computing I

Due Monday, October 19, 2009, 11:30 PM
30 points total


Read the introduction, Sections 1 ("United States") and 4 ("copyleft:) in the Wikipedia article on Software Copyright.  It's perhaps a total of two screenfulls of information, probably less.  (Yes, it's Wikipedia so it might change some, but it's highly unlikely it'll change significantly over the course of a couple of days.)
  1. (10 points) In Lecture 3 (10/5/09) I briefly discussed Don Knuth's literate program -- roughly, eight pages of exceedingly documented Java-like code -- and Doug McIlroy's six-line shell script that does basically the same thing.  In one paragraph, argue whether McIlroy's program is or is not a copyright violation of Knuth's.
  2. (20 points) Assume that you decided to cheat on one of your UW CSE programming assignments.  You found another student's program somewhere on a computer that was unprotected.  Ignoring any issues of academic misconduct -- and these would indeed be severe -- in one or two paragraphs argue whether you would or would not be violating the other student's copyright protections.
Submit one file (.pdf, .doc, .docx, or .txt) to the Catalyst dropbox.  Grades will be based on clarity of your thoughts and your writing, as well as the factual basis of U.S. copyright law.  (No, I do not expect you to do any significant reading beyond the Wikipedia article, so I understand that your knowledge of the law is inherently limited.)