Question

Ethical Decision Making

Iris had gathered her planning team and announced the choice for the model on which they would base their approach, and now one of the more senior people was asking her why she had not chosen the ISO/IEC 27000 series as a model.

“Since the 27000 series is mostly complete these days, why wouldn’t we use that?” he asked.

“Well, I looked at the details of that approach,” Iris said, “and I decided that the expense of purchasing a copy of the standard for our use was not worth the few extra benefits it would provide us.”

“But why do we have to pay a license fee?” the senior analyst asked. “I have a copy of the standard that I got from a friend of mine. It’s a PDF file and we can use it right away.” Iris sighed, then paused.

“It’s a copyright-protected document,” she finally said.

1-What did Iris mean by her final remark?

2- If the company intended to develop its own plan based on an unlicensed but copyrighted document, and if detection and prosecution for having violated the copyright was unlikely, would it still be unethical to take that approach?

Answer 1

1.
Iris wanted to make it clear that the document is a copyrighted. It will be illegal to use to use a copy without specific permissions from owner.
Copyright means that the creator of that document has exclusive rights of its use. A copy of such document needs to be made strictly with the written permission of the owner.

2.
It will still be unethical approach as the document is copyrighted. Using an document is another thing and cloning or pirating is another. These actions are abided by the Law.
In our case, the document is copyrighted and a license is needed to access it. If you still manage to get a copy of such document and use it, it will be illegal and you could be procecuted regarding this. Even if detection and prosecution for violation is unlikely, it is still unethical to use such document.