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I. A Useful Outline
I analyze faith-discipline issues in Computer Science into three overlapping areas. You may pick any one of the areas for your further investigation.
A. Ethics/law. We've spent a lot of time on ethical case studies already. I offer one more essay below (III) to reinforce the unique aspects of ethics when applied to CS.
B. Foundations of CS. Dr. Wayne Iba's January term course spent a lot of time on the philosophy of artificial intelligence. I will summarize some of my professional publications regarding faith-discipline ideas. I offer an essay below (II) in this category.
C. Workplace Christianity. This category is less interesting to me, only because it is less tied to CS in a unique way, whereas I claim in the above two areas, there is a unique Christian content as well as a general Christian approach. This category is where such things might go as--
II. The Malleability of Cyberspace
If I need someone to blame for this section, it's Curt Byers who asked me in 1997 to read the MIT Press book by Allucquere Rosanne Stone entitled The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (1995). Messiah's Library has it now. Curt thought I would be interested because I have an ongoing Christian ministry helping folks to deal with gender issues. Sandy Stone (www.actlab.utexas.edu/~sandy/) is the Director of the Interactive Multimedia Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also transgendered. (That does not mean transsexual--she has not had a sex change; she is still biologically a male.)
From Stone I learned that maybe 40% of those who enter on-line chatting do so attributing to themselves a gender opposite that of their biological gender. I thought that to be a high percentage, but just yesterday a colleague in the Language Literature and Communications department told me that a teen fellow told her that he "was a 39-year old divorced woman on line last night."
Cyberspace asks us to reflect on what is reality in many ways. Can photographs be admissible as evidence in a court case, when anyone with a copy of Photoshop can change the reality of the photo? Can the Wachowski brothers' film The Matrix (us.imdb.com/Title?0133093) be a helpful metaphor for God's relationship to humanity, when it encourages us to question whether there is any reality at all? Can gender-bending in chat rooms teach us something about how our culture regards personal identity, when it causes us to despair that we have any personal identity?
For another sexually charged example, What is pornography? Newsweek (March 19, 2001 issue, page 51) this week has an article, "Is it sexual exploitation if victims are 'virtual'?" The Supreme Court court had to decide whether certain pictures were child pornography. The pictures were completely fabricated from geometric forms; the pictures were not photographs of actual children-- as realistic as they looked. The Ninth Circuit Court held that free speech requires that a ban on child pornography can justify only "the protection of the actual children used in the production of child pornography." Will the Supreme Court overturn this ruling? I think that it will. Technology is so good now that it is no longer possible to prove that a picture of a child is a real child. Strong free speech advocates cry, "Victimless crime!" in protest.
The now well-known New Yorker cartoon has one dog say it for us all, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
At every point in the history of cultures, Christians have adapted timeless truth to cultural forms. Martin Luther recommended using beer for communion because it paralleled the common drink--wine--that was used for communion in Jesus' day, according to one tale. Christians in Papua New Guinea use manioc root--their "bread"--for communion.
Instead of rejecting Aristotle's teaching as pagan, Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle's natural law arguments for God to further the cause of Christ. Instead of reject Plato's teaching as pagan, Augustine of Hippo used Plato's view of what was real as a window on heaven. Instead of rejecting modern physics, Christian philosophers are using its "anthropic cosmological principle" to provide a new argument from design of God's existence. Instead of condemning the Oriental principle of the Tao that points to universal laws of the good, C. S. Lewis used the Tao in defense of Christ (The Abolition of Man, Appendix--Illustrations of the Tao, pp. 95 ff.).
The Gospel of our being in Christ can itself be viewed in many ways: As a buy-back ("redemption"), as a non-traditional family ("adoption"), as a legal victory ("propitiation"), and as a life-giving ("new creature," "grafted into Abraham").
Into what changed form will the Gospel mutate so as to assure that its timeless truth will not mutate?
III. Intellectual Property (IP)
Suppose that you wrote your boyfriend a letter on expensive parchment with a calligraphic pen. Suppose he distributed copies of your letter to his friends. He is in violation of your copyright in the letter, which since 1976 is automatic without your having to file with the Federal government for copyright, and without your writing on the bottom of the letter, "Copyright © 2001. Susan Norris. All rights reserved." (International copyright requires the "all rights reserved" addition.) He owns the parchment, not you. You own the intellectual property, not he. He may not even translate it into French and distribute the French version, even though it was not your words, since the translation is a "derivative work."
Your boyfriend is permitted to let his friends read his copy. It's not a great idea, but it's legal.
Software is a strange kind of intangible property. It is expressive and it is functional. Because it is expressive, even if it is not communicating with a human, software has long been regarded as able to be copyrighted. Typically that begins with the source code, and then extends to the complied code as a derivative work--a translation if you will. Copyright protection is a part of the US Constitution because our nation's founders wanted people to be able to earn their living by their creative expression. That is why you may not audiotape a music concert that you attend without permission. You may not forward an email from your boyfriend to anyone else without his permission. The email is not written on parchment, but it does embody your creative effort.
Software is also functional. Thus more recently the US Patent Office has been allowing software to be patented. The classic example is the Amazon one-click® patent. A careful reading of the patent shows no code, only flowcharts and hand-drawn screen shots. This is consistent with patents given for machinery, which are described functionally in a design document. From patenting the design of tangible artifacts, the Patent Office moved to allowing the patent of business processes. From there is was a short step to allowing software to be patented.
Both copyrights and patents are about permission to reproduce. But in the case of web pages (broadly including all digital content) access is reproduction. To download is necessarily to copy. Thus no one is saying that copying in all forms is forbidden. But how can we distinguish between necessary copying to see the pages at all and copying for purposes of stealing?
Recently regarding software as if it were property that might be stolen has a new twist: Can you trespass on software? The answer seems to be yes. Recent court cases have argued that "deep linking" is wrong in both senses in which those words are used. In the first sense, deep linking refers to linking to a page of information at a web site that contains precise information to be indexed instead of to the doorway page of that site. This might bypass advertizing pages, or more importantly might present the information at the site out of order. If the site were describing the proper procedures to use in administering a drug, imagine how tragic it would be if those procedures were presented to another site by links that put the steps out of order or that omitted some of the steps. You might think that the courts would hold in cases like these that deep linking amounts to a "recompilation," in violation of copyright. But linking is not copying anything. Linking is like citing, not like stealing. Courts recognized that preventing linking on these grounds alone is too shaky a case. So instead the courts have found that this kind of deep linking is a form of trespassing. (See Maureen A. O'Rourke, "Is virtual trespass an apt analogy?" CACM, Feb. 2001, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 98-103. This is on reserve for our course.)
A second sense of deep linking is accessing not just the static pages of a web site, but all possible dynamic content of websites as well. For example, Database Site might present for free survey results to anyone visiting the site, as long as they clicked on their state and county so that the results for their county could be delivered. Courts have held that it is illegal for a web spider to hit such a site with enough intelligence to request every county in the US, and then to make that information available to a search engine. If this causes harm to the business of the database site, then Database Site can be sued for "trespass of chattels." ("Chattels" means moveable property in contrast with real property.) Harm could be in the form of decreased ad revenue because people were happy with the search engine results without proceeding further to the Database Site, or even in the form of decreased reputation. (O'Rourke, ibidem)
There is an additional legal issue about software that is not related to its being property. We enter contracts about software. A contract is an agreement between two parties. The restrictions and permissions of contracts range far more widely than IP law. The question for software is what it takes to execute a contract. If you open a CD containing software after reading the shrink-wrap license, have you entered into a contract? Suppose instead that you download software from the Internet which is "click-wrapped," asking you to abide by terms that you most probably did not read in full. Have you entered into a contract?
Two further legal asides before I comment on the Christian aspects of this legal labyrinth. The phrase "one-click" by the way is a registered trademark of Amazon. Trademarks are another area of law that relate to computer science because of the rash of folks who bought domain names on speculation. Courts have declared that you may not buy a domain name like www.Coke.net and then sell it to Coca-Cola. Even trademarks that are not registered have this protection if they can be proven to be recognizably in use.
The Napster case shows that software cannot be regarded as free speech, even if it does communicate with humans. Again, a CS construct is confronted by a legal constraint.
Christian implications
So what! Does the Bible have anything to say about IP? Open Source® software is consistent with Scott McNealy's cry, "Software wants to be free." But so is piracy consistent with his cry.
Here is a first crack at some Bible verses that relate to IP. I should respect legally consistuted authority (Rom 13:1). But I don't have to be naive--I can exercise all of the cleverness that I'm capable of within the limits of the law to minimize the effect of the laws with which I may disagree, as long as I do no harm (Matt 10:16). I can take advantage of non-Christian wisdom in doing this (Luke 16:8), but I may not be deceitful (I Thess 2:3).
That is a rather proof-texting approach, not exactly taking the verses entirely in context. A fuller context would talk about the Bible's approach to economics, or to work, or to my being a person of my word.
I am responsible to obey even the laws about which I have not taken the time to learn. Just reading the IRS code would be a full-time job. Eventually I simply say that a strictly legal approach is barren; I take an approach of grace and mercy. I learn what I can. I obey with as much honesty and strength as I am capable of. I leave the rest to God.
To be continued ...
Version 1.1. April 15, 2001. Last modified . File is
