It’s an interesting dilemma as to where corporations lie. Whether or not they should be considered “people” is a question that seems to spark thoughts from both sides of the political spectrum.
The idea of corporate personhood is that corporations have rights that are the same, or at least in part the same, as those of a human citizen. This means that corporations have the ability to make decisions and are protected by the constitution in the same way as individuals. The companies could has the right to own land, be sued, be protected from unreasonable searches and seizure, among other rights. This allows companies to act separately, but by the influence of, their shareholders.
However, for many reasons, this corporate personhood can create issues, from both sides of the fence. These issues such as endorsing political candidates, providing contraceptives, and the protection of the personal property of shareholders. Companies are often powerful, wealthy, and can exhibit great influence where they so choose. This makes it important to closely look at what companies are able to do. With that said, it may also be important to protect the individual shareholders when the company, or its workers, are truly at fault. There are arguments for both sides.
The Sony rootkit controversy involved the company installing digital rights management (DRM) software onto the computers of users when particular CD’s were listened to. This angered certain people for multiple reasons, the majority being the following:
- Users weren’t told it was installed
- It opened up security vulnerabilities
- It couldn’t be uninstalled
I don’t believe this was necessarily fully ethical or unethical. Sony was attempting to protect it’s intellectual property and used a particular product from another company to do so. This action was not unethical in itself. However, it appears as though Sony did not do its due diligence in recognizing what that product actually was in the first place. I would hope that Sony simply didn’t understand what the software was doing under the hood. Perhaps some higher-ups heard it was nearly undetectable and it would protect their intellectual property, and they just said “sounds good.” That’s certainly dumb, and maybe unethical in ignorance, but not intentionally malicious. I do believe that Sony should have done a better job in being open with its consumers and ensuring that everyone knew what was going on. It would have looked better on the company and all the people involved. Their punishment was about as ambiguous as their actions, but perhaps the public shaming was enough.
I think that corporate personhood carries with it an expectation of doing the right thing. If humans do the wrong thing, they are punished. Companies should be held to a similar standard, and probably to a further extent. Companies in almost all cases influence more people’s lives on a day to day basis than any particular individual. This means that any action a company undertakes should probably be examined closely as to how it will affect a large group of people.
In the case of Sony, they probably should be held responsible for the protection of the hundreds of thousands of users’ computers that the DRM software was installed on. Users have the right to protect themselves on their computers, and if they can’t (as was the case with the rootkit), then the entity causing this roadblock should be fixing it.
Ethics Blog 