The case about Alice who is an author, who did asked permission to use one’s work but the current publisher required large amount of money without considering that the work is very old and they are not the original publisher of the work.
Ethically, yes the publishers could require significant fees to be paid to them if their material is reproduced, but in the case of Alice we may consider that it is not the original publisher who priced her with significant fees, we could consider it as an abused of rights considering the value of the book. Thou, publishers have the right to require certain amount under to which contract but again publisher should think ethically so that they could not abused those rights. In the case of Alice, the publisher should consider the value of the book before they require significantly large amount of money. For us it is not so ethical for the publisher and encourages authors to plagiarize.
Nevertheless, it will be not ethical to make modifications of diagrams, and therefore avoid the payment of permissions fees. But if the publishers abused their rights which hinders the progress of a certain knowledge then for us we will ‘barrow the idea of one author’ and not to make modification.
For software, it will depend if it is permissible to take another person’s code, and make limited modification to it. If it is open source code then it is permissible to do modification and present it as your own work provided by giving proper credit of the previous coder. But if it is not an open source then it is not ethical. And finally, to compare to the case of Alice, then it is not ethical for a coder if he or she requires large amount of money considering his/her code’s value.
5.7 An Ethical Dilemma
The case here is about developing a website that will monitor and get information to those people that will use the website.
Well, for us if we are in the good side then we will develop the site. In this case as a professional we even contribute to our community by helping our law enforcement to monitor terrorism and criminal acts. For us we will not object on our boss to develop those sites providing that a law enforcement agency asked it, perhaps, the unethical part is not the developer of the site but the law enforcement agency who asked in terms of gathering information of the users of the sites.
For us we are doing our job as developers(considering also we help protect humanity) and they are doing their job as a law enforcement agency, in some point it is an honor for us to help limit the crime in our community. And we also think that the internet is currently being policed because in some country they have law governing the use of the internet so for sure those law enforcers or agency are setting monitors to track those violators.
