Ethics and the Internet

The Internet has become one of the most important media for the purposes of communication and information. Salient characteristics of the Internet are its easy accessibility, the relative insignificance of mechanisms of control over the use of the medium, and its global character. These features give rise to complicated ethical questions. These are concerned with the quality of information on the Internet, a just distribution of opportunities to use information on the Internet, privacy, intellectual freedom, property rights, and the impact of the use of the Internet on individual identity and society. Ethics and the Internet contains twelve essays written by outstanding scholars from the United States and Europe specializing in philosophical and legal aspects of modern information and communication technologies. The book tries to anticipate and analyze the developments and to put forward normative proposals for solving the problems involved. The book consists of an introductory essay on general ethical aspects of the Internet, essays on information rights and privacy, on the Open Source Software movement, on data mining and group profiling, on quality of information, and on the impact of the Internet on individual identity and society. The contributing authors are Julie Cohen of Georgetown University Law Center, Bart Custers of Tilburg University and Eindhoven University of Technology, Jeffery Johnson of Eastern Oregon State University, Paul de Laat of the University of Groningen, Peter Levine and Robert Wachbroit of the University of Maryland, Gijs van Oenen of Erasmus University Rotterdam, Otto Kroesen of Delft University of Technology and Peter Blok, Roland Pierik, and Anton Vedder of Tilburg University. The book is free of jargon and can be read without anterior technical knowledge. It is of importance for anyone interested in social and moral aspects of modern technology, especially for students of information technology, philosophy, ethics, and law.