Paper II: laws and regulations related to technology

For this paper you are asked to examine a current law, a legal ruling, or an existing or a proposed regulation related to technology. You may start with a recent news article describing a legal case or a proposed law, and then do more research on the laws and regulations related to the issue. Here is an example of an article that may be a starting point:
Copyright Enters a Gray Area on wired.com.
Find out more information about the law. Some sources turned up in Google search on copyright laws on music sampling: Music law on http://law.freeadvice.com/
Even more information about copyright law (which is the law relevant to the above case) can be obtained at http://www.copyright.gov/.
You are expected to do a substantial amount of research on the law(s) or regulation(s) in question. If you are writing about a proposed law, research the current legal situation. Your sources may include reliable online sources (such as federal government or state government web sites) or materials in the library.

Your paper should:

  1. describe the legal case, a law/regulation, or a proposed law/regulation (with detailed information about the people/organizations involved),
  2. identify the interested parties (the "stakeholders") in this case,
  3. discuss the position of each of the interested groups on the issues,
  4. discuss how interests of each groups are affected by the law, regulation, or legal decision,
  5. express your point of view on the issue: do you consider the law fair? do you consider it ethical? Motivate your point of view. If you disagree, what alternative(s) would you consider to be acceptable?
  6. if your opinion about the issue has changed while you were studying the situation, how did it change and why?

You paper must satisfy the following requirements:

  1. It must be no less than 4-5 pages long (standard font).
  2. The case or the law that you describe must be related to technology. If this connection is not obvious, please explain.
  3. You must clearly cite all your sources. While you don't need to study legal aspects of current laws/regulations in detail, you need to use reliable sources to find out about them, not just an article that references them. For example, the second source above probably has sufficient information about the music copyright law, but I would use the last one (the government web site) to verify this information.
Good luck!
This page is a part of IS 1091 at UMM web pages.