General Ethical Principles Provide Guidelines

General Ethical Principles
Name
Institution
General Ethical Principles
Ethics are imperative, both at a personal and professional level because they provide guidelines for people to differentiate between good and bad behaviors or activities. Technological advancement in the IT industry presents new ethical issues every day, making it important to establish and understand ethical principles to enhance professionalism. Moreover, due to the abundance of online resources, intellectual property is often violated. The right of the innovators must be protected against the misuse/stealing of unique product of their mind.
Violation of intellectual property is an ethical violation for various reasons. First, the new world of the information society, reinforced by cyberspace and global networks inevitably generated wide social and ethical issues. The most deeming problems involve intellectual property protection. Intellectual property rights protect the welfare of the creators by providing them rights over their creations. Being in the middle of public interest and scientific innovations, the intellectual property appears to be caught at the crossroads of many tensions related to the exclusiveness of unique ideas. According to Shah, Warsh, and Kesselheim (2013), developed countries have incorporated intellectual property rights into global trade agreements since the 1980s after they started losing market shares. This indicates that for countries and companies to grow and remain profitable, intellectual property rights must be enacted. As such, violation of intellectual property raises ethical issues because in doing so, creators and innovators are denied their right of ownership of ideas. Also, as noted by Shah, Warsh, and Kesselheim (2013), failure to protect intellectual property may discourage disclosure and innovation, which would negatively affect society’s ability to improve the existing ideas.
Further, several issues are branching out from intellectual property such as piracy. The concept of piracy is the unlawful copying of software. According to Ugbogbo and Atu (2016), piracy contributes to the loss of profits for companies whose intellectual property rights have been violated through piracy. Copying someone else’s software illegally denies them...