The Internet has become one of the most important media for the purposes of communication and information. Salient characteristics of the Internet are its easy accessibility, the relative insignificance of mechanisms of control over the use of the medium, and its global character. These features give rise to complicated ethical questions. These are concerned with the quality of information on the Internet, a just distribution of opportunities to use information on the Internet, privacy, intellectual freedom, property rights, and the impact of the use of the Internet on individual identity and society. Ethics and the Internet contains twelve essays written by outstanding scholars from the United States and Europe specializing in philosophical and legal aspects of modern information and communication technologies. The book tries to anticipate and analyze the developments and to put forward normative proposals for solving the problems involved. The book consists of an introductory essay on general ethical aspects of the Internet, essays on information rights and privacy, on the Open Source Software movement, on data mining and group profiling, on quality of information, and on the impact of the Internet on individual identity and society. The contributing authors are Julie Cohen of Georgetown University Law Center, Bart Custers of Tilburg University and Eindhoven University of Technology, Jeffery Johnson of Eastern Oregon State University, Paul de Laat of the University of Groningen, Peter Levine and Robert Wachbroit of the University of Maryland, Gijs van Oenen of Erasmus University Rotterdam, Otto Kroesen of Delft University of Technology and Peter Blok, Roland Pierik, and Anton Vedder of Tilburg University. The book is free of jargon and can be read without anterior technical knowledge. It is of importance for anyone interested in social and moral aspects of modern technology, especially for students of information technology, philosophy, ethics, and law.
About the Author: Anton Vedder is a full-time professor of Law and IT at ICRI/CIR since October 2014. He is also part time associate professor w of Ethics and Technology Regulation since 1996 at the Tilburg University. Recent publications include articles and books on the interplay of technological developments and the conceptualization of basic moral and legal notions (trust in e-health, innovative technologies, care and enhancement and justice, privacy and profiling, etc). He is a founding member of the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT). He was involved in a collaborative European BIOMED I project and is still participating in various EU funded international research projects, including ENDORSE, ROBOlaw, MUSES, and WITDOM. He was a visiting scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics (Washington, DC) and the University of Maryland. He organized various international workshops, seminars and conferences, e.g., on innovative health technologies and personal and professional autonomy in health care, the WTO and ethics, reliability and security of information, human enhancement, and the legitimacy of NGOs in the international arena. Anton is one of the founders of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Programme of Law, Science and Technology. Currently, he is also the leader of the Tilburg contribution to the research programme on Trusted e-Healh Care Solutions within the public-private research community COMMIT and of the Socially Robust e-Coaching project on the moral and legal preconditions for user trust in e-coaching facilities, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and Philips. Anton teaches courses on legal informatics, ICT law, technology risks and regulation, and healthcare technology and regulation in the undergraduate and graduate programmes of KU Leuven and Tilburg University.