Andrew Heinz's List: Digital Law

Of course, if enforcement should come down to something like arresting ordinary citizens, there may be a problem. "It's one thing if it's a Mob front pirating Hollywood movies," Richieri says. "It's quite another if it's a matter of the copyright police coming to your house and hauling away your 15-year-old [child]. That's not going to happen."

Richieri suggests instead that we may see an educational and public awareness campaign on the part of the copyright industry to educate people about the principles and value of the law. He also speculates that you may see action taken to force universities and other places where a great deal of infringement activity goes on -- to monitor the use of their systems. In addition, he thinks that Internet service providers may be sued on a sort of contributory infringement argument: that they know that their lines are being used to commit illegal infringement.

Not long ago, a Justice Department official marveled at the fact that while most parents would be horrified if they walked into their child's room and found 100 stolen music CDs, very few have a problem with the idea that their kids may have hundreds of illegally downloaded songs on their computer hard drives.

This attitude that illegally distributing and downloading copyrighted music through peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa or Grokster is somehow different (and definitely less troubling) than shoplifting CDs from a store accounts in large part for the epidemic of online-music thievery. This rampant theft is undermining the livelihoods of artists and songwriters, not to mention the very future of music itself.

The argument is made that the best way to change this attitude is to cajole people into doing the right thing, specifically, to offer fans more and better legitimate ways of getting music online. In fact, the music industry has been doing just this, and very aggressively. In addition to the recently announced Apple Store, Time magazine has noted that there "are already a couple of dozen legal, pay-to-play downloading services, including Pressplay, Listen.com's Rhapsody and Music Net," which are not only on the right side of the law but are also "more reliable than Kazaa and its ilk."

Fortunately, there are ways that online education can do just that, as we have learned while team-teaching an ethics course that blends traditional classroom activities with an unusual online component.

This is the second year we will teach "Sustainability Ethics" at our respective colleges, Arizona State University and the Rochester Institute of Technology. In the course, students play interactive games that we developed to explore theoretic problems relating to important issues in sustainability. While they participate in the usual learning activities like reading, discussion, and writing assignments, they experience ethical issues personally through the games, in which they have an opportunity to advance their own grades at the expense of classmates' grades.

To complicate matters, each game randomly positions students at different levels of privilege, so it is more difficult for some students to earn grade points than others. Finally, we link our two classes (using EthicsCore, an information-technology platform supported by the National Science Foundation) so that decisions made by one class affect grades earned by the other, 2,300 miles away. Students deliberate across universities exclusively online, in discussion rooms and chat windows.