I have not blogged recently because I have been busy giving radio and press interviews while vacationing in Hawaii for a few weeks. However, I could not help but comment on the 2007 State Piracy Study by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) that was released recently. In it, BSA claims that

The national average for software piracy in 2007 was 20%, meaning that one in five pieces of PC software in use in the United States was unlicensed. States with piracy rates well above the national average include California, 25%; Illinois, 22%; Nevada, 25%; and Ohio, 27%. Business Software Alliance - Lost Revenues from Software Piracy in Eight States Would Have Been Enough to Fund 54,000 High Tech Workers, Build 100 Schools or Hire 25,000 Police Officers

The report goes on to say that the $’s lost from the eight states studied represent financial losses greater than the financial losses from any single country in the world except China.

The good news, if you can call it that, is the US had the lowest software piracy rate of any of the 108 countries studied.

Software piracy is to theft what white lies are to lies. In both cases it is all too easy for people to tell themselves a story about how it doesn’t fully count somehow. Everyone else is doing it. No one will know. Or a myriad of other rationalizations.

If you have pirated software on your computer and you feel a bit guilty about it, this is a hopeful sign. It means you haven’t become completely numb to the ethics of the situation and you have not completely bought your attempted rationalizations to yourself.

Ethical habits start with the small things — such as software piracy. Fortunately, in the case of software piracy, it is a relatively cheap proposition to practice doing the right thing and develop good ethical decision making habits. These could come in handy when you find yourself in situations with bigger stakes.

Tags: computerethics, business ethics, clint korver, ethics for the real world

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Grand Theft Auto IV, which started selling April 29th, is the most expensive game ever made ($100 million), one of the highest rated games ever made, had the largest first day sales (609,000) of any game ever made, and might become one of the most controversial games ever made.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the New York City police, and even New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg have already gone on record protesting the lessons the game teaches kids.

But is there anything ethically amiss with the game? What about this notion that the game somehow exerts an inappropriate influence on kids? Let’s break it down and see. First we need to separate out the prudential and legal issues to more clearly focus on the ethics.

Legal: MADD wants to reclassify Grand Theft Auto IV as an Adults Only game. Neither Sony nor Microsoft currently sell AO on their consoles in the US, so this could disrupt sales considerably. However, just as the current classification does not mean there are no ethical issues, a reclassification of AO would not mean the game had ethical issues. Ethics do not change based on the lobbying abilities of any particular constituency.

Prudential: Any issues related to the sales or profitability of the game are prudential. Take Two Interactive’s (the maker of the game) decision to allow people to drive home drunk in the game, is a business decision that they presumably believe will help sell more games. They probably left other behaviors that they believed would hurt game sales. Sales and profit motivations are prudential only.

Ethical: But have they gone too far? Are they somehow risking what is right in the name of profit? Take Two discloses in its mature rating, that that game contains “Blood, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, and Use of Drugs and Alcohol.” This allows consumers to make an informed purchase decision, so I don’t see any issues here with lying or deception. This in some ways is the acid test of ethics. Most ethical transgressions involve deception.

I don’t see any ethically sensitive issues with Grand Theft Auto IV. Now this doesn’t mean I want my kids playing it. But the decision of whether or not to let my kids play the game is a prudential one. And I must compare this decision in the context of other activities they engage in — from playing make believe cops & robbers to watching violent shows like the Shield on TV to reading articles in the morning newspaper about Josef Fritzl. These are important decisions with complex considerations, but they are not ethically sensitive.

Tags: Grandtheft auto IV, ethics, personal ethics, clint korver, ethics for the real world

I found an entertaining blog this morning discussing internet ethics. Chris Pirillo, the blog’s author, was responding to a set of questions asked of him by a computer science student. Those questions were:

How would you define the computer Ethics in today’s digital world?
Is it important for Social Networking sites to enforce Ethical behavior on said sites?
Is there a true code of Ethics regarding computer use and practices of it on the Web?

Chris did a good job identifying honesty and transparency as important online ethical considerations. He also nicely described the social feedback that happens when people act inconsistently with the norms of a social network. I would answer the questions slightly differently. Here is my comment to his blog response:

Chris,

Good answers. I would add that ethics don’t change when you go online. Lying online is ethically no different than lying offline. The anonymity and social feedback make the dynamics of online interactions around lying different, but this does not change the underlying ethical issue.

I would also add that there is no “true code of ethics” regarding computer use anymore than there is a “true code of ethics” regarding behaviors in general. While all major religions tend to agree that you should ethically avoid harming, thievery, lying and adultery, there are many cultural and personal interpretations of this.

I personally view ethics as your personal standards of right and wrong. If you may have different standards of right and wrong than some social networks or online communities. There are easy solutions to this. If you find some social networks ethically objectionable — don’t participate. Likewise if a social network finds your online behaviors unacceptable — they will ask you not to participate.

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Tags: computerethics, clint korver, ethics for the real world,