I completed a PhD in philosophy at the University of Queensland in November 2011. My thesis (Douglas, 2011) presented a framework describing the rights and duties various stakeholders may have over computer software, and examined the arguments for and against granting users specific rights over the software they use.
I published two papers based on thesis chapters. ‘A Bundle of Software Rights and Duties’ (Douglas, 2011) presented the framework of property rights and duties that describes the various ways software may be used by three types of stakeholders: users, developers, and custodians. ‘The Social Distuility of Software Ownership’ (Douglas, 2011) is based on the thesis chapter that examines the arguments against software ownership based on the social costs of withholding rights from users.
References
2011
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The Rights and Duties of Software Users: An Examination of the Ethics of Software Ownership
David M. Douglas
2011
Software ownership significantly affects the users of information technology as it allows owners to withhold rights from users and also impose duties upon them. This thesis evaluates this ownership by determining the rights and duties users should hold by using a conceptual framework of rights and duties over software to evaluate the major arguments for and against software ownership. I begin by describing the relevant aspects of software and the intellectual property laws covering it, and the software licenses defining the rights and duties of software users. I distinguish between three groups of people associated with any software project: creators (those who write the software), custodians (those who control the rights and duties others have over the software), and users (those who use the software). These classifications are used to define a set of rights and duties that these groups may possess over a particular program. The major categories of software ownership (such as the public domain, free software, open source, freeware, shareware, and retail software) are described in terms on this framework. I use this framework to determine the particular rights creators and custodians can justifiably withhold from users based on the three arguments most frequently given for why software creators should have greater control over the software they develop. These arguments claim that the creator’s labour in developing her software grants her an entitlement to claim ownership over it (the labour entitlement argument), that the creator deserves to own her program as a reward for developing it (the desert argument), and that granting ownership to creators is the most effective incentive for encouraging software development (the consequentialist incentive argument). I then examine the three major arguments for giving users greater control over software to determine the particular rights and duties that these arguments require users to possess. These arguments are that software ownership causes an unjustified social harm (the social disutility argument), that granting users more rights over software improves software quality (the open source argument), and that users need greater control over the software they use to protect their autonomy (the liberty argument). After evaluating these arguments, I conclude by comparing the different bundles of rights and duties each argument grants users to determine if there is any agreement between them over the particular rights and duties that should be granted to users and which rights creators and custodians can legitimately withhold from them. Finally, I compare the rights and duties that various kinds of software licenses grant users and determine whether they grant users the bundle of rights and duties that are justified by the arguments discussed.
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A Bundle of Software Rights and Duties
David M. Douglas
Ethics and Information Technology, 2011
Like the ownership of physical property, the issues computer software ownership raises can be understood as concerns over how various rights and duties over software are shared between owners and users. The powers of software owners are defined in software licenses, the legal agreements defining what users can and cannot do with a particular program. To help clarify how these licenses permit and restrict users’ actions, here I present a conceptual framework of software rights and duties that is inspired by the terms of various proprietary, open source, and free software licenses. To clarify the relationships defined by these rights and duties, this framework distinguishes between software creators (the original developer), custodians (those who can control its use), and users (those who utilise the software). I define the various rights and duties that can be shared between these parties and how these rights and duties relate to each other. I conclude with a brief example of how this framework can be used by defining the concepts of free software and copyleft in terms of rights and duties.
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The Social Disutility of Software Ownership
David M. Douglas
Science and Engineering Ethics, Sep 2011
Software ownership allows the owner to restrict the distribution of software and to prevent others from reading the software’s source code and building upon it. However, free software is released to users under software licenses that give them the right to read the source code, modify it, reuse it, and distribute the software to others. Proponents of free software such as Richard M. Stallman and Eben Moglen argue that the social disutility of software ownership is a sufficient justification for prohibiting it. This social disutility includes the social instability of disregarding laws and agreements covering software use and distribution, inequality of software access, and the inability to help others by sharing software with them. Here I consider these and other social disutility claims against withholding specific software rights from users, in particular, the rights to read the source code, duplicate, distribute, modify, imitate, and reuse portions of the software within new programs. I find that generally while withholding these rights from software users does cause some degree of social disutility, only the rights to duplicate, modify and imitate cannot legitimately be denied to users on this basis. The social disutility of withholding the rights to distribute the software, read its source code and reuse portions of it in new programs is insufficient to prohibit software owners from denying them to users. A compromise between the software owner and user can minimise the social disutility of withholding these particular rights from users. However, the social disutility caused by software patents is sufficient for rejecting such patents as they restrict the methods of reducing social disutility possible with other forms of software ownership.
