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:
- describe the legal case, a law/regulation, or a proposed
law/regulation (with detailed information about the
people/organizations involved),
- identify the interested parties (the "stakeholders") in
this case,
- discuss the position of each of the interested groups on the
issues,
- discuss how interests of each groups are affected by the law,
regulation, or legal decision,
- 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?
- 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:
- It must be no less than 4-5 pages long (standard font).
- The case or the law that you describe must be related to
technology. If this connection is not obvious, please explain.
- 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.