“To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society”
Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc.
Course Description
This course will examine philosophical, legal, political, historical, social and economic issues surrounding information property and information privacy. We will begin by surveying the current state of digital technology, including its potential effects on communication, creativity, and social/political arrangements. With this context in place, we will then examine the philosophical origins of our notion of property and how they might impact and be impacted by emerging technologies. This will lead us into a discussion of the ethical consequences of these new technologies, particularly the pressure they place on familiar notions of privacy and rights. Along the way, we will consider issues of ownership, creativity, piracy, hacker culture, the open source movement, privacy rights, identity, bioinformatics, and national security.
Course Objectives
- To examine the concepts of property and privacy from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
- To develop familiarity with philosophical arguments, classical and contemporary texts, and broad positions in the study of property and privacy.
- To connect theoretical discussions of property and privacy to emerging realities of information communication and technology.
- To build skills in philosophical writing, including interpreting, analyzing, and responding to various texts as well as producing original, cogent essays.
Required Texts
J. D. Grunebaum, Private Ownership (London and New York: Routledge, 1987)
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (Penguin, 2004)
Additional readings—to be distributed
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to talk and think about issues of information property and privacy in a theoretical and sophisticated way. Ideally, you’ll be able to pick up any recent book or article related to our course topics and make connections to the texts we’ve studied, assess the quality of that book or article, and form a critical and intelligent reaction to it. More importantly, you’ll be able to look at issues in news and politics in a different, philosophically informed light. This ability can help make you a more careful consumer of information and a better (world) citizen.
To help you achieve these abilities, this course will do two main things. First, it will introduce you to ideas and arguments that are crucial in this discussion. Many texts we’ll be reading are major papers in these debates. You’ll need to read them slowly and carefully and, in some cases, more than once—say, before and after each class. You’ll also need to attend class regularly. Some of class will be lecture, in which I’ll train you to interpret and respond to the reading assignments. Some of class will be discussion, in which you’ll raise questions about the texts, express reactions to them, and try out your own arguments about them.
In addition to readings, a second part of the course will involve assignments of various kinds:
Discussion questions (9 sets of 3 questions each, 20%) will help you to read our texts closely and carefully. They’ll also give you the opportunity to think more about the issues in them and focus on parts that interest or puzzle you. These questions must be submitted via email by 9p on Sunday of each week. These questions should NOT be descriptive textual questions (e.g., “What is Locke’s definition of ownership?”) or bio-historiographical questions (e.g., “When did Hume write this book?”). They should be complex, analytical questions that reflect parts of our readings that intrigue, puzzle, or disturb you. Which weeks you prepare questions for is your choice; you must prepare 9 by the end of our 12 reading weeks. If you plan ahead, you should be able to skip weeks when you are particularly busy with papers or other classes.
One take-home exam (35%) will test your competency on the material in the first unit of the course. I will distribute the exam questions in advance, and I strongly recommend that you write your responses to each question immediately after we discuss that topic. No late responses will be accepted.
One position paper (1,000 words, 25%) in response to the second unit of the course will give you the chance to voice your own positions and reactions to a major text in light of previous background readings. Questions for the response paper will be distributed at the beginning of this unit, and you should use them guide your reading and thinking during that unit. No late responses will be accepted.
One discussion preparation paper (1,000 words, 20%) during the final unit of the course will invite you to connect contemporary examples to our course readings. This will serve both as a tool to enhance your understanding of the reading and as material for discussion in class. I will distribute several possible prompts for your response at the end of the second unit of the course, and the due date for your response will vary according to the topic you choose. No responses will be accepted after the due date for a given topic.
Course Schedule
This is a tentative outline of our readings and topics for the course. I may, on occasion, add, delete, or substitute readings. Any changes will be announced in class and posted to Blackboard.
PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF PROPERTY THEORY
- Week 1 Introduction
Grunebaum, Chapter 1 (1–24) - Week 2 Natural Perfectionism
Grunebaum, Chapter 2 (25–51); SUGGESTED: Plato, Republic, Book V and Laws, Book V; Aristotle, Politics II.1–6; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IIa, IIae, q66, a2 and a7 - Week 3 First Appropriationism
Grunebaum, Chapter 3 (52–85); SUGGESTED: Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V; Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” Part II; Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Chapter 7, Section 1 - Week 4 Conventionalism
Grunebaum, Chapter 4 (86–115); SUGGESTED: Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapters XIII–XV; Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 3, Part 2, Sections 2–3 and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Part II, Section 3 - Week 5 Communism
Grunebaum, Chapter 5 (116–140); SUGGESTED: Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844” (read sections “Estranged Labor” and “Private Property and Communism”) and “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Part I
NEW CHALLENGES OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
- Week 6 Intellectual Property 1: Piracy
Lessig, Free Culture (1–79)
Take-Home Exam due (at beginning of class) - Week 7 Hackers and the Open Source Movement
Thomas, Hacker Culture, Chapters 1–2, and Coleman, “Code is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers” - Week 8 Intellectual Property 2: Puzzles and Prospects
Lessig, Free Culture (83–305)
PRIVACY RIGHTS AND APPLIED ISSUES
- Week 9 Privacy: Legal and Ethical Foundations
Warren and Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy” and van den Hoven, “Information Technology, Privacy, and the Protection of Personal Data” - Week 10 Privacy: Challenges
Mill, from On Liberty and Thomson, “The Right to Privacy”
Position Paper due (at beginning of class) - Week 11 Identity
Marx, “Identity and Anonymity: Some Conceptual Distinctions and Issues for Research” and Matthews, “Identity and Information Technology”; SUGGESTED: Westin, “Social and Political Dimensions of Privacy” - Week 12 Bioinformatics
de Crew, “Privacy and Policy for Genetic Research” and Tavani, “Genomic Research and Data-Mining Technology: Implications for Personal Privacy and Informed Consent” - Week 13 National Security
Waldron, “Safety and Security” and Zedner, “Too Much Security?”; SUGGESTED: Zedner, “The Concept of Security: An Agenda for Comparative Analysis” and Taipale, “Data Mining and Domestic Security: Connecting Dots to Make Sense of Data”
