Chapter 15 • Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues 589downloaded. Among those sued were a 12-year-old girl, a
working mom, a college football player, and a 71-year-old
grandpa who blamed his grandkids for the legal mess.
Most of those sued have settled out of court for a few thou-
sand dollars, but the message has been sent that those who
share copyrighted music on the Web are not anonymous
and might be subjected to expensive penalties.
There are now a number of convenient ways of pay-
ing for and downloading music legally, such as from
iTunes and Amazon.com, and this approach now accounts
for about 20 percent of recorded music sales. But despite
everything, over 95 percent of the music that is down-
loaded is pirated (IFPI, 2009).
Ethical Questions
It seems clear that large numbers of people are comfortable
illegally downloading copyrighted entertainment on the
Internet. A survey by Public Affairs (2003) of 1,000 U.S.
college and university students found the following about
student attitudes and behavior:
1.Sixty-nine percent of the students surveyed have down-
loaded music from the Internet, and three-fourths of the
downloaders admitted to never paying for the music they
download. Thus, over half of the students surveyed had
been downloading music and never paid for any of it.
2.Only 24 percent of the students said that it is always
wrong to pirate music and movies, 55 percent said it
depends on the circumstances, and 21 percent said it
is always right.
Most ethical rules conclude that taking something of
value from others without their consent is unethical.
Although most students would consider stealing the physi-
cal recording from a store to be unethical, somehow many
students seemingly do not think that downloading the same
song is unethical.
This raises the question that we have discussed
before: How do you determine if an action is unethical? Do
you ask: Does it violate some absolute rule such as “do not
steal”? Do you apply a general rule such as “treat others as
you would want to be treated”? Or is something ethical if it
is acceptable in your culture? In this case you might ask:
Would I mind if everyone knew about this? After deter-
mining that something is unethical, then the question may
be: Am I willing to be ethical when it costs me?
Other Social Issues
In this section we introduce other important social issues
that we cannot cover more thoroughly because of space
limitations.
Access to the Technology
IT has become such an essential ingredient of a modern
economy that people who do not have access to IT are
precluded from full participation in the benefits of the
economy. Similarly, societies are doomed to third-world
status if they do not have a computer-literate population
provided with access to modern IT.
Computer access (including access to the Internet) is
widely available in the United States, and computer literacy
is relatively high and growing. As reported by the National
Center for Education Statistics, 91 percent of U.S. children in
nursery school and students in grades kindergarten through
12 use computers and 59 percent use the Internet (DeBell and
Chapman, 2006). Furthermore, this participation rate is
growing year after year. On the other hand, there is a “digital
divide,” even in developed countries: In the United States,
computer and Internet use are divided along demographic
and socioeconomic lines with whites having more usage than
Hispanics and blacks. Also, those living in U.S. households
with higher family incomes are more likely to use computers
and the Internet than those living in lower-income house-
holds, and the lower-income children tend to have access to
these technologies only at school while the higher-income
children have access at both home and school.
The good news is that the digital divide is getting
smaller and smaller over the years. In the United States from
2006 to 2008, the percentage of Hispanic adults using the
Internet grew from 54 to 64 percent, while the percentage of
black adults using the Internet grew from 61 to 63 percent
and the percentage of white adults grew from 72 to
76 percent (Pew Hispanic Center, 2009). Overall, the United
States has an Internet use penetration rate of 76.3 percent
(Internet World Stats, 2010). However, in terms of wireless
Internet use (including the use of mobile devices), a greater
percentage of U.S. Hispanic adults (68 percent) and black
adults (60 percent) use wireless than white adults
(54 percent) (Horrigan, 2009). The digital divide is therefore
diminishing, and it is expected to continue to diminish as
older generations that did not grow up with or use these
technologies in the workplace become a smaller percentage
of the U.S. population.
From a global perspective, Japan has an Internet use
penetration rate of 75.5 percent and therefore lags only very
slightly behind the United States. Oceania and Australia
follow at 60.8 percent, and Europe—with widely varying
rates from country to country—comes in at 53.0 percent.
Latin America and the Caribbean have a 31.9 percent par-
ticipation rate, the Middle East has a 28.8 percent participa-
tion rate, Asia (including Japan) has a 20.1 percent rate, and
Africa has an 8.7 rate (Internet World Stats, 2010). In gen-
eral, the developing countries lag far behind the developed