Thoughts after reading The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll

In our day it is common to hear people say things like, "It's okay for me to download music using bit torrent programs as long as I don't sell it and make a profit from it" or "I just downloaded that movie to see if it's worth buying." As I read The Cuckoo's Egg my mind kept coming back to thoughts about software, music, and video piracy and the it occurred to me that people don't realize the impact of their actions on the Internet. It seems that many people fail to make a connection between the virtual world and the real world and it causes them to live by different moral laws when they are on the Internet than when they interact with people in real life. Below I have listed three things that we can do to keep our morality monitors in check as we enter the digital world.

Make the connection between the digital world and the real world.
In The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll compares networked computers to neighborhoods and he talks about how the hacker is simply trying each door to see if it is locked on all the houses in the neighborhood. This metaphor brings the hacker's actions from the digital world into the real world. A similar metaphor could be used to compare copying music from a friend's computer to stealing a CD from the store. Most people wouldn't steal a CD from a store, but thousands of songs are pirated by those same people who would "never steal." Comparing our actions online to real life events will help us make better decisions.

Look at piracy from a different point of view.
A friend of mine, we'll call her Jane, designs digital scrapbook kits that she sells online. Recently somebody broke into the online store, downloaded her scrapbook kits, and started posting them on forums so anyone could download them for free. Jane was furious because hours of her hard work was being distributed to thousands of people for free. In discussions with Jane prior to this incident she had talked about all the free songs she had downloaded from the Internet and how it was so cool that she could get them for nothing. I don't know if Jane has made the connection, but it is very clear to me that we need to realize that people have put a lot of work into their music, videos, software or whatever else they are selling and it is wrong to give out copies to the world.

Do what we know is right.
Laws governing technology will always be insufficient, but that does not mean we should abuse them. It took a long time to get laws in place that made it illegal to break in to other people's computers, but that did not change the fact that before the law was passed it was wrong to break into other people's computers. As technology continues to advance I hope that we will start living by what we know to be right even when we find situations where laws have not yet been passed.