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174 Part One Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise

property protection from theft, at least for music, videos, and television shows
(less so for software). The Apple iTunes Store legitimated paying for music and
entertainment, and created a closed environment where music and videos could
not be easily copied and widely distributed unless played on Apple devices.
Amazon’s Kindle also protects the rights of publishers and writers because its
books cannot be copied to the Internet and distributed. Streaming of Internet
radio, on services such as Pandora and Spotify, and Hollywood movies (at sites
such as Hulu and Netflix) also inhibits piracy because the streams cannot be
easily recorded on separate devices. Moreover, the large Web distributors like
Apple, Google, and Amazon do not want to encourage piracy in music or videos
simply because they need these properties to earn revenue.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 also provides
some copyright protection. The DMCA implemented a World Intellectual
Property Organization Treaty that makes it illegal to circumvent technology-
based protections of copyrighted materials. Internet service providers (ISPs)
are required to take down sites of copyright infringers they are hosting once the
ISPs are notified of the problem. Microsoft and other major software and infor-
mation content firms are represented by the Software and Information Industry
Association (SIIA), which lobbies for new laws and enforcement of existing laws
to protect intellectual property around the world. The SIIA runs an antipiracy
hotline for individuals to report piracy activities, offers educational programs
to help organizations combat software piracy, and has published guidelines for
employee use of software.

ACCOUNTABILITY, LIABILITY, AND CONTROL

Along with privacy and property laws, new information technologies are
challenging existing liability laws and social practices for holding individuals
and institutions accountable. If a person is injured by a machine controlled, in
part, by software, who should be held accountable and, therefore, held liable?
Should a public bulletin board or an electronic service, such as America Online,
permit the transmission of pornographic or offensive material (as broadcast-
ers), or should they be held harmless against any liability for what users trans-
mit (as is true of common carriers, such as the telephone system)? What about
the Internet? If you outsource your information processing, can you hold the
external vendor liable for injuries done to your customers? Some real-world
examples may shed light on these questions.

Computer-Related Liability Problems
For a week in October 2011, millions of BlackBerry users around the world began
experiencing disruption to their e-mail service, the most vital service provided
by the smartphone maker Research in Motion (RIM). The three-day blackout of
e-mail involved users in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, a sub-
stantial part of BlackBerry’s installed base of 70 million users. The BlackBerry,
until recently, had the dominant position in the corporate smartphone market
because it provided excellent e-mail security, and integrated well with corporate
mail servers. The iPhone and Android smartphones championed by employees
now account for more than half of all new corporate mobile devices. The outage
is expected to encourage more corporations to abandon the BlackBerry. On the
positive side, police departments around the world reported a significant drop
in urban car accidents during the outage because drivers could no longer text or
telephone using their BlackBerry (Austen, 2011).

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