Legal rights to which the creator of intellectual property ‐ original creative works‐ are entitled
– Who has the right to use, perform, or display the creative work
– What legally can be done with that work
– How long the creator retains right to the property
– And other related restrictions
3 main types of intellectual property rights
– Copyrights
– Trademarks
– Patents

Many of the ethical issues that face IT professionals involve privacy. For example:

• Should you read the private e-mail of your network users just “because you can?” Is it okay to read employees’ e-mail as a security measure, to ensure that sensitive company information isn’t being disclosed? Is it okay to read employees’ e-mail to ensure that company rules (for instance, against personal use of the e-mail system) aren’t being violated? If you do read employees’ e-mail, should you disclose that policy to them? Before or after the fact?
• Is it okay to monitor the Web sites visited by your network users? Should you routinely keep logs of visited sites? Is it negligent to not monitor such Internet usage, to prevent the possibility of pornography in the workplace that could create a hostile work environment?
• Is it okay to place key loggers on machines on the network to capture everything the user types? Screen capture programs so you can see everything that’s displayed? Should users be informed that they’re being watched in this way?
• Is it okay to read the documents and look at the graphics files that are stored on users’ computers or in their directories on the file server?

Remember that we’re not talking about legal questions here. A company may very well have the legal right to monitor everything an employee does with its computer equipment. We’re talking about the ethical aspects of having the ability to do so.

As a network administrator or security professional, you have rights and privileges that allow you to access most of the data on the systems on your network. You may even be able to access encrypted data if you have access to the recovery agent account. What you do with those abilities depend in part on your particular job duties (for example, if monitoring employee mail is a part of your official job description) and in part on your personal ethical beliefs about these issues.