Legal and Ethical Concerns: Copyright, Plagiarism and Open Licenses
Anything you make on a computer, from a song to a game level, belongs to someone, and computers make it possible to copy that work in seconds.
That ease of copying sits behind most of the legal and ethical questions in computing: who owns a piece of work, who gets paid for it, who may use it, and what happens when computing is used to hurt people.
Who owns what you create on a computer?
Material created on a computer, including code, photos, music, videos, writing and game designs, is the intellectual property of the person who made it, or of an organization, such as a company that paid an employee to make it. In the United States, copyright protects an original work automatically as soon as it is saved or written down. You do not have to register it or add a © symbol. Copyright protects work made by people, though. The US Copyright Office has said that an image or text made entirely by an AI tool, with no human creative input, cannot be copyrighted, and federal courts agreed in 2023 and again in 2025.
Digital work is easy to reach and easy to share, and that raises hard questions about it:
Creators and companies take measures to safeguard their intellectual property: copyright notices and license terms that say how a work may be used, watermarks on photos, passwords and paywalls that limit who can see a work, and digital rights management (DRM), which stops a downloaded movie or e-book from being copied.
What counts as plagiarism?
Using material that someone else created, without permission, and presenting it as your own is plagiarism. Turning in a classmate's code with your name on it, pasting paragraphs from a website into an essay, and submitting a program an AI tool wrote as if you wrote it all count. Renaming the variables in copied code does not make it yours either: the ideas and structure still belong to the person who wrote it. Plagiarism can earn a zero at school, and using someone's work without permission can also break copyright law, which can lead to fines or lawsuits.
The habit that prevents it: always cite material that someone other than you created, whether it is a photo, a quote, a dataset or a code segment.
Permission and credit are two separate things. Citing a photo does not give you permission to use it, and permission to use a photo does not remove the need to say whose it is. Plagiarism checkers look for the credit part: they compare your work with other text and flag passages that match too closely.
How can you legally use someone else's work?
Three approaches let you use other people's work legally, often for free.
Creative Commons licenses are public copyright licenses. With one, a creator gives everyone permission to share, use and build on a work that would otherwise be fully protected by copyright. The creator picks the conditions by combining a few elements:
| Element | What it means |
|---|---|
| BY | You must credit the creator. |
| SA (ShareAlike) | If you share a changed version, it must use the same license. |
| NC (NonCommercial) | You may not use it for commercial purposes, meaning mainly to make money. |
| ND (NoDerivatives) | You may share it only unchanged. |
So CC BY-NC means "credit me, and don't use this to make money." Separately, CC0 lets a creator give up their rights entirely, so no conditions apply.
License Credit Commercial Changes Same license CC0 no yes yes no CC BY yes yes yes no CC BY-SA yes yes yes yes CC BY-NC yes no yes no CC BY-ND yes yes no no CC BY-NC-SA yes no yes yes CC BY-NC-ND yes no no no
Open source software is made freely available, and anyone may redistribute and modify it. Python itself is open source, and so are the Firefox browser, the Linux operating system and much of the software that runs websites. Open-source licenses still have conditions. Most require you to keep the original copyright notice, and some, like the GPL, require changed versions to stay open source too. On a code-sharing site, the conditions are usually in a file named LICENSE at the top of the project, so read it before you copy anything.
Open access research is published online free of all restrictions on access, and free of many restrictions on use, such as copyright or license limits. Anyone can read the papers on arXiv or PubMed Central without paying, while many traditional journals charge $30 or more to read a single article.
Creative Commons, open source and open access have together opened up a huge amount of digital information to everyone. Wikipedia's text is shared under a Creative Commons license, millions of photos on Wikimedia Commons can be reused with credit, and students everywhere learn to code with free, open-source tools.
Check your understanding
Jayden finds a paragraph on a website that explains recursion clearly. He pastes it into his project write-up with no quotation marks and no source. Which statement is accurate?
A student wants to use a photo licensed CC BY-NC as the title screen of a phone game she plans to sell for $0.99. What does the license allow?
Which two are legal ways to use material created by someone else? Select two answers.
Select 2 answers.
Which description fits open access?
Practice: credit, licenses and copying
Write format_attribution(title, creator, source, license_name) that returns a credit line in this form:
"Title" by Creator (source), licenseRemove extra spaces from the start and end of title and creator. If creator is empty after that, write an unknown creator in its place.
format_attribution("Sunset", "Ana Ruiz", "flickr.com", "CC BY 4.0")
-> '"Sunset" by Ana Ruiz (flickr.com), CC BY 4.0'Write can_use(license_name, commercial, changed) that returns True if a Creative Commons license allows the planned use and False otherwise.
commercial is True if the use is commercial. Licenses containing NC forbid that.changed is True if you will share a changed version. Licenses containing ND forbid that.License names look like "CC BY", "CC BY-NC-SA" or "CC0".
can_use("CC BY-NC", True, False) -> FalseWrite word_overlap(text_a, text_b) that measures how much two texts share. Lowercase each text, split it into words, and strip the characters .,!? from both ends of each word. Collect each text's words in a set. Return the number of words in both sets divided by the number of words in either set, as a percent rounded to 1 decimal place. If neither text has any words, return 0.0.
word_overlap("the cat sat on the mat", "the cat sat on a mat") -> 83.3When does computing raise legal and ethical concerns?
As with any technology, using computing to harm people raises legal and ethical concerns. Cyberbullying, posting someone's home address online to harass them, and AI-made fake images of real people are all examples. Laws are catching up: the TAKE IT DOWN Act, a 2025 US federal law, made it a crime to post intimate images of a real person without consent, including AI-generated fakes, and requires websites to remove them within 48 hours of a valid request.
Computing also plays a role in social and political issues, which brings its own legal and ethical questions. Social media helps people organize protests and campaigns, and it also spreads political misinformation. In January 2024, voters in New Hampshire received robocalls in which an AI-generated copy of President Biden's voice told them not to vote in the primary election. A month later, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that AI-generated voices in robocalls are illegal under an existing law.
The digital divide raises ethical concerns too. When school assignments, job applications or government services are online-only, the people without access are left out through no fault of their own.
Some well-known computing innovations that raised legal and ethical concerns:
Check your understanding
The procedure canShare decides whether a planned use of a licensed work is allowed. Which call returns false?
PROCEDURE canShare(isCommercial, isChanged, allowsCommercial, allowsChanges){IF((isCommercial AND NOT allowsCommercial) OR (isChanged AND NOT allowsChanges)){RETURN(false)}RETURN(true)}
Which two statements about intellectual property are accurate? Select two answers.
Select 2 answers.
Which computing innovation raises legal and ethical concerns mainly because it collects and analyzes data by monitoring activities all the time?
Exam topics: 5.5 Legal and Ethical Concerns (IOC-1.F)