5.5 Legal and Ethical Concerns

What you need to know

• Intellectual property (IP) is work or an invention that results from creativity and to which someone has rights — including software, images, music, and text.
• Copyright protects creative works; using someone's material without permission is a violation. Software, artwork, and writing found online are copyrighted by default even without a notice.
• Creative Commons licenses let creators grant specific permissions in advance (e.g., free to use with attribution, or free for non-commercial use), so others can reuse work without asking.
• Open source software makes its source code freely available to use, study, modify, and distribute, under a license that sets the terms. Open access refers to freely available research and publications.
• The Create Task requires you to cite any code you didn't write yourself. Using others' code is fine; failing to credit it is not.
• Ethical concerns raised by computing: privacy and surveillance, algorithmic decision-making in high-stakes areas, the spread of misinformation, and access to technology that can be used for harm as well as good.
• Legal concerns include plagiarism, piracy, hacking and unauthorized access, and misuse of personal data. Laws vary by country and lag behind technology.
• Computing innovations can be used in ways their creators find objectionable — the exam asks whether the developer, the user, or society bears responsibility, and expects nuance.

Worked example

You find a JavaScript animation library on the web with no license file. You can look at it, but copying it into your project is a copyright question — no license means all rights reserved. Another library uses an open-source license that permits reuse with attribution. You use that one and credit it in your code comments. On the Create Task, the credited library is fine; uncredited copied code is treated as plagiarism.

Going deeper

The nuance, edge cases, and connections that turn a 3 into a 5.

• Intellectual property covers creative and inventive work: software, music, images, writing, inventions. The creator has legal rights to control its use. On the internet, IP is easy to copy and hard to protect, which creates constant legal and ethical tension.
• Copyright is automatic — a work is copyrighted the moment it's created, with or without a notice. Using copyrighted material without permission is infringement. "I found it online" is not permission. "It didn't have a copyright symbol" is not permission.
• Creative Commons licenses let creators pre-grant specific permissions: attribution required, non-commercial only, share-alike (derivatives must use the same license), no derivatives. Each license is a different bundle. CC doesn't mean "free for anything" — read which one.
• Open source software makes its source code available under a license that permits use, modification, and redistribution — often with conditions (attribution, or that derivatives also be open). It's still copyrighted; the license grants rights that copyright would otherwise reserve.
• Open access is the research-publication equivalent: papers and data freely available rather than behind paywalls. It's a movement about who gets to read science.
• The Create Task requires you to cite code you didn't write — in comments, with the source. Using others' code is allowed; presenting it as your own is plagiarism and can invalidate your score.
• Ethical concerns the CED names: computing innovations can be used in ways their creators find objectionable (a face-recognition tool used for surveillance), and computing raises questions about privacy, ownership of data, misinformation, and who bears responsibility for harm.
• Legal concerns: laws differ by country and change slowly. Something legal in one jurisdiction may not be in another. And laws lag technology — a new capability may be legal simply because no law addresses it yet, which doesn't make it ethical.
• The exam distinguishes legal from ethical: something can be legal and unethical (collecting data users don't understand they're giving), or illegal and arguably ethical (civil disobedience). Questions may ask you to identify which kind of concern a scenario raises.

Mistakes that cost points

• Treating "no license" as "free to use." It means all rights reserved. Default copyright is the strictest state.
• Assuming Creative Commons or open source means no rules. Both are licenses with conditions. Attribution is almost always required.
• Not citing code on the Create Task. Uncited code from any source — a tutorial, a classmate, an AI — is plagiarism under College Board policy.
• Conflating legal with ethical. The exam treats them as separate questions. Legal ≠ right.

Practice questions

Written in the style of the real exam. Try each one before revealing the answer.