Online research in philosophy

The United Nations Global Compact – which is a Global Public Policy Network advocating 10 universal principles in the areas of human rights, labor standards, environmental protection, and anticorruption – has turned into the world's largest corporate responsibility initiative. Although the Global Compact is often characterized as a promising way to address global governance gaps, it remains largely unclear why this is the case. To address this problem, we discuss to what extent the initiative represents an institutional solution to exercise global governance. We suggest that new governance modes, which have arisen in the context of globalization, often adopt a multiactor, multilevel, and network-based approach. We then analyze how far the Global Compact's institutional design reflects this multiactor, multilevel, and network-based steering mode. Drawing on this discussion, we offer suggestions regarding how the initiative can be further developed.

Software is much more than sequences of instructions for a computing machine: it can be an enabler (or disabler) of political imperatives and policies. Hence, it is subject to the same assessment in a normative dimension as other political and social phenomena. The core distinction between free software and its proprietary counterpart is that free software makes available to its user the knowledge and innovation contributed by the creator(s) of the software, in the form of the created source code. From an ethical perspective, one of the most pressing questions raised by this form of collaboration is the question of the rights, and the restrictions on them, that are passed on to users and collaborators by the creators of programs. That is, what freedoms do software users deserve, and how can they best be protected? In this study we analyze free software licensing schemes in order to determine which most effectively protects such freedoms. We conclude that so-called copyleft licensing schemes are the morally superior alternative.

The world is increasingly characterized by transnational interdependence, cross-border policy externalities and the widely perceived need to provide certain global collective goods and to avoid global collective bads. Consider, for example, the problem of climate change and the need to limit greenhouse gas emissions; the problem of global refugee flows and the commitment to protect the human rights of forced migrants; and the problem of controlling and eradicating infectious diseases that can spread very fast, such as new forms of influenza. In all these cases, the need for “global governance”, that is, the challenge to make good collective decisions and to coordinate actions transnationally, is more pressing than ever. There are at least two dimensions of this challenge. First, global public goods are typically underprovided, and global public bads over-occur, in part because there are too few mechanisms to prevent free-riding at the global level (the “efficiency dimension”).1 And second, where global public goods are provided, and global public bads avoided, this is often the result of bargaining based on differential..

The types of errors that emerge in the development and maintenance of software are essentially different from the types of errors that emerge in the development and maintenance of engineered hardware products. There is a set of standard responses to actual and potential hardware errors, including: engineering ethics codes, engineering practices, corporate policies and laws. The essential characteristics of software errors require new ethical, policy, and legal approaches to the development of software in the global arena.

Introduction : changing forms of global order. Towards a multipolar world ; The paradox of our times ; Economic liberalism and international market integration ; Security ; The impact of the global financial crisis ; Shared problems and collective threats ; A cosmopolitan approach ; Democratic public law and sovereignty ; Summary of the book ahead -- Cosmopolitanism : ideas, realities and deficits. Globalization ; The global governance complex ; Globalization and democracy : five disjunctures ; Cosmopolitanism : ideas and trajectories ; Cosmopolitan realities ; Addressing the institutional deficit : reframing the market -- Principles of cosmopolitan order. Cosmopolitan principles ; Thick or thin cosmopolitanism? ; Cosmopolitan justifications ; From cosmopolitan principles to cosmopolitan law -- Cosmopolitan law and institutional requirements. The idea of cosmopolitan law ; Institutional requirements ; In sum ; Political openings -- Violence, law and justice in a global age. Reframing human activity : international law, rights and responsibilities ; 9/11, war and justice ; Islam, the Kantian heritage and double standards ; Concluding reflections -- Reframing global governance : apocalypse soon or reform!. The paradox of our times ; Why be concerned with global challenges? ; Deep drivers and governance challenges ; Global governance : contemporary surface trends ; Problems and dilemmas of global problem-solving ; Strengthening global governance ; Global governance and the democratic question ; Multilevel citizenship, multilayered democracy -- Parallel worlds : the governance of global risks in finance, security and the environment. Global governance and the paradox of our times ; The global governance of finance ; The global governance of security ; The global governance of the environment ; Conclusion : crisis, politicization and reform -- Democracy, climate change and global governance. Democracy I : the democratic nation-state and climate change ; Democracy II : global governance and climate change ; The policy debate : squaring the circle? ; The political elements of a democratic global deal ; Democracy and the policy menu ahead.

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.

Using concepts of neoinstitutional economics, such as transaction cost economics, institutional economics, property rights theory, and information economics, the development of the Open Source movement is investigated. Following the evolution of institutions in Open Source, it is discussed what the comparative institutional advantages of this model are. The conclusion is that it is the institutional framework of Open Source, not merely the low cost of Open Source software that makes it an attractive alternative mode of organizing the production and distribution of software and software-related services. Alternative organizations will be formed and existing organizations will be transformed to take advantage of its opportunities.

This article helps to clarify and articulate the ideological, legal, and ethical attitudes regarding software as intellectual property (IP). Computer software can be viewed as IP from both ethical and legal perspectives. The size and growth of the software industry suggest that large profits are possible through the development and sale of software. The rapid growth of the open source movement, fueled by the development of the Linux operating system, suggests another model is possible. The large number of unauthorized copies of software programs suggests that many people do not believe in laws regarding software copyright. There are many and varied views of software as IP, even within the information systems (IS) profession. In this article, four distinct subgroups of IS professionals are identified. The article describes the four subgroups and their respective ideological views on software ownership; it explores the subgroups' attitudes regarding software laws; and finally, it explains the ethical positions embraced by each subgroup.

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.

War has broken out in the technological global economy, principally in battles over intellectual property. A particularly fierce aspect ofthis battle sets people who guard proprietary software against hackers, who want information to be free. The key challenge today is to produce an adequate conceptual lens for seeing what ethically is at stake in this battle. Toward this end, this paper uses the just war tradition to analyze differences between proponents of Free Software and proponents of Open Source Software. This paper’s use of three just war criteria—Just Cause, Right Intention, and Discrimination—illustrates how the just war tradition can raise the level of ethical awareness about the intellectual property wars that continue to rage in the technological global economy.