intellectual property survey

[Paula Foster <foster -dot- 242 -at- OSU -dot- EDU>]

Hi folks,

Thanks to all of you who helped us out by replying to our survey regarding
intellectual property law on the Web.  For everyone who's interested, we've
posted our survey results on the Web at

http://www.COHUMS.OHIO-STATE.EDU/English/people/ulman.1/courses/E883C/Resear
ch/Paula_Jeff/Loewfost.htm

Note that this site is still under construction; several of the links
are currently defective.  We recommend that you scroll through our
sequential version of the text (by clicking on 'Click Here to Read Our Text
Sequentially') rather than the hyperlinked version.

We found much of our data to be most comprehensible in the form of graphs.
Unfortunately, these graphs are memory hogs, and currently look terrible in
HTML.  We've included a few of these graphs on the current site, in our
'Results' section, and we hope to include the rest when we find a better way
to present them.

For those of you who just want a quick summary, here are our two main findings:

1) There was a close correlation between "legal" and "ethical" in people's
perceptions.  In other words, if a behavior is perceived as legal, it was
also perceived as ethical, and vice versa: behaviors that are perceived as
illegal are also perceived as unethical.  This was somewhat surprising to
us, because there is a lot of controversy about the fairness of copyright
law, and plenty of people (outside of the population we studied) do not feel
the laws line up with ethics very well at all.

2) There seems to be a widespread feeling that giving credit to the
creator(s) of the material you are using makes a legal difference--in other
words, if there is some doubt about whether or not it's legal (and ethical)
to use a given piece of material, the feeling was that if you cite your
source, that makes it more likely to be legal.  (In point of fact,
attribution makes not a bit of difference.  If it's illegal to use
something, it's still illegal even if you credit the source.)

Thanks very much to those of you who responded to our survey, and thanks to
all for reading this far.  Feel free to contact us directly is you have any
questions.  We are, once again,

Paula Foster            foster -dot- 242 -at- osu -dot- edu

and

Jeff Loew               loew -dot- 6 -at- osu -dot- edu


at your service and in your debt.

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