Contact: Phil Hearn
Charlotte Coker
Students facing such digital-age dilemmas as whether to download pirated music and movies to their personal computers are hashing some of those ethical and legal questions in a course offered at Mississippi State University.
Computer science lecturer Charlotte Coker's class on social and ethical issues addresses current widespread copying of music over the Internet, a practice now under legal assault in 261 copyright infringement lawsuits filed Sept. 8 against "major offenders" by the Recording Industry Association of America.
The MSU course also deals with a wide variety of other legal and ethical issues floating around cyberspace such as hacking and cracking, plagiarism, identity theft, industry violations, viruses, privacy and societal impacts. But the pirating of music and movies over high-speed computers is a particularly hot-button issue among students.
"The legal issue that most students are familiar with is the issue of peer-to-peer networking. This goes back to Napster," said Coker, referring to the once popular Internet service that shut down in 2001 after a court ruled it violated copyright laws. "When students find out it's a federal crime, it's an issue they can relate to."
The recording industry contends music pirating has caused a 25 percent decline in CD sales since 1999, the year Napster released its initial file-swapping software. Other file-swapping services have survived by avoiding Napster's practice of providing a central directory of computer files, prompting RIAA to go after individual users who share at least 1,000 files.
Coker, who worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's space program after graduating from MSU in 1967 with a degree in mathematics and an emphasis in computer science, currently teaches two classes offered by the computer science and engineering department. The department is a part of the Bagley College of Engineering.
Each class is composed of about a dozen majors in such fields as computer science, computer engineering, software engineering and business information systems. Students are assigned topics, make presentations, analyze case studies and hold roundtable discussions. They also explore complex ethical theories, but avoid espousal of specific religious doctrines.
Although U.S. copyright laws provide for damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song offered illegally on a person's computer, the RIAA has indicated it will consider settlement proposals from defendants. For example, the mother of a 12-year-old New York City girl named in one of the RIAA lawsuits already has settled for $2,000.
"The problem is the recording industry makes a tremendous profit off CD sales and they want to force the students (or adults) into buying a whole CD of songs," said Coker, who "semi-retired" to her hometown of Starkville in 1987 after working many years as a software analyst and executive manager for several Fortune 500 companies. "But when an individual just wants one song, they don't want to pay $16 for that song.
"The software that's out there now doesn't need a server," she explained. "It (the music or movie) just goes from their computer to your computer. It's called peer-to-peer networking. The recording industry is fighting this capability tooth and nail."
She contends the music industry should have followed the lead of Apple Computer Inc., which earlier this year began offering songs over the Net for 99 cents each on its iTunes Music Store. Apple customers can sample 30 seconds of any song before purchase, then buy and download single tracks or entire albums.
"The other thing that's going to come up and bite the recording industry is that some individual artists are now setting up their own Web sites to sell their music directly to consumers," predicted Coker.
Each class Coker teaches is composed of about a dozen student majors in such fields as computer science, computer engineering, software engineering and business information systems. Students are assigned topics, make presentations, analyze case studies and hold roundtable discussions. They also explore complex ethical theories, but avoid espousal of specific religious doctrines.
"It's important that students have their consciousness raised about ethical issues they may find as professionals in the computing field," said Coker, whose late father, Felix Edwards, and 92-year-old mother, Charline Edwards, served on the MSU faculty for many years in agricultural engineering and zoology, respectively.
Coker's course also explores differences between computer hackers and crackers.
"Young hackers may go in there and infect a computer system, not with evil intent but because they don't know what they're doing," Coker noted. "Crackers are described as mean-spirited hackers who break into systems with intent to do damage."