2: Understanding Ethical and Legal Obligations

Your Ethical and Legal Obligations

In addition to enjoying rights, an employee assumes obligations, which can form a clear and reasonable framework for discussing the ethics of technical communication. The following discussion outlines four sets of obligations that you have as an employee: to your employer, to the public, to the environment, and to copyright holders.

OBLIGATIONS TO YOUR EMPLOYER

You are hired to further your employer’s legitimate aims and to refrain from any activities that run counter to those aims. Specifically, you have five obligations:

Competence and diligence. Competence refers to your skills; you should have the training and experience to do the job adequately. Diligence simply means hard work. Unfortunately, according to a recent survey of 10,000 workers, the typical worker wastes nearly two hours of his or her eight-hour day surfing the web, socializing with co-workers, and doing other tasks unrelated to his or her job (Malachowski, 2013).
Generosity. Although generosity might sound like an unusual obligation, you are obligated to help your co-workers and stakeholders outside your organization by sharing your knowledge and expertise. What this means is that if you are asked to respond to appropriate questions or provide recommendations on some aspect of your organization’s work, you should do so. If a customer or supplier contacts you, make the time to respond helpfully.
Honesty and candor. You should not steal from your employer. Stealing includes such practices as embezzlement, “borrowing” office supplies, and padding expense accounts. Candor means truthfulness; you should report to your employer problems that might threaten the quality or safety of the organization’s product or service.

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Issues of honesty and candor include what Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, calls trimming, cooking, and forging (Sigma Xi, 2000, p. 11). Trimming is the smoothing of irregularities to make research data look extremely accurate and precise. Cooking is retaining only those results that fit the theory and discarding the others. And forging is inventing some or all of the data or even reporting experiments that were never performed. In carrying out research, employees must resist any pressure to report only positive findings.
Confidentiality. You should not divulge company business outside of the company. If a competitor finds out that your company is planning to introduce a new product, it might introduce its own version of that product, robbing your company of its competitive advantage. Many other kinds of privileged information—such as information on quality-control problems, personnel matters, relocation or expansion plans, and financial restructuring—also could be used against the company. A well-known confidentiality problem involves insider information: an employee who knows about a development that will increase (or decrease) the value of the company’s stock, for example, buys (or sells) the stock before the information is made public, thus unfairly—and illegally—reaping a profit (or avoiding a loss).
Loyalty. You should act in the employer’s interest, not in your own. Therefore, it is unethical to invest heavily in a competitor’s stock, because that could jeopardize your objectivity and judgment. For the same reason, it is unethical (and illegal) to accept bribes or kickbacks. It is unethical to devote considerable time to moonlighting (performing an outside job, such as private consulting), because the outside job could lead to a conflict of interest and because the heavy workload could make you less productive in your primary position. However, you do not owe your employer absolute loyalty; if your employer is acting unethically, you have an obligation to try to change that behavior—even, if necessary, by blowing the whistle.

For more about whistle-blowing, see “The Role of Corporate Culture in Ethical and Legal Conduct.”

OBLIGATIONS TO THE PUBLIC

Every organization that offers products or provides services is obligated to treat its customers fairly. As a representative of an organization, and especially as an employee communicating technical information, you will frequently confront ethical questions.

In general, an organization is acting ethically if its product or service is both safe and effective. The product or service must not injure or harm the consumer, and it must fulfill its promised function. However, these commonsense principles provide little guidance in dealing with the complicated ethical problems that arise routinely.

According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (2013), more than 4,500 deaths and 14 million injuries occur each year in the United States because of consumer products—not counting automobiles and medications. Even more common, of course, are product and service failures: products or services don’t do what they are supposed to do, products are difficult to assemble or operate, they break down, or they require more expensive maintenance than the product information indicates.

Although in some cases it is possible to blame either the company or the consumer for the injury or product failure, in many cases it is not. Today, most court rulings are based on the premise that the manufacturer knows more about its products than the consumer does and therefore has a greater responsibility to make sure the products comply with all of the manufacturer’s claims and are safe. Therefore, in designing, manufacturing, testing, and communicating about a product, the manufacturer has to make sure the product will be safe and effective when used according to the instructions. However, the manufacturer is not liable when something goes wrong that it could not have foreseen or prevented.

OBLIGATIONS TO THE ENVIRONMENT

One of the most important lessons we have learned in recent decades is that we are polluting and depleting our limited natural resources at an unacceptably high rate. Our excessive use of fossil fuels not only deprives future generations of them but also causes possibly irreversible pollution problems. Everyone—government, businesses, and individuals—must work to preserve the environment to ensure the survival not only of our own species but also of the other species with which we share the planet.

But what does this have to do with you? In your daily work, you probably do not cause pollution or deplete the environment in any extraordinary way. Yet you will often know how your organization’s actions affect the environment. For example, if you work for a manufacturing company, you might be aware of the environmental effects of making or using your company’s products. Or you might help write an environmental impact statement.

As communicators, we should treat every actual or potential occurrence of environmental damage seriously. We should alert our supervisors to the situation and work with them to try to reduce the damage. The difficulty, of course, is that protecting the environment can be expensive. Clean fuels usually cost more than dirty ones. Disposing of hazardous waste properly costs more (in the short run) than merely dumping it. Organizations that want to reduce costs may be tempted to cut corners on environmental protection.

OBLIGATIONS TO COPYRIGHT HOLDERS

As a student, you are often reminded to avoid plagiarism. A student caught plagiarizing would likely fail the assignment or the course or even be expelled from school. A medical researcher or a reporter caught plagiarizing would likely be fired, or at least find it difficult to publish in the future. But plagiarism is an ethical, not a legal, issue. Although a plagiarist might be expelled from school or be fired, he or she will not be fined or sent to prison.

By contrast, copyright is a legal issue. Copyright law is the body of law that relates to the appropriate use of a person’s intellectual property: written documents, pictures, musical compositions, and the like. Copyright literally refers to a person’s right to copy the work that he or she has created.

The most important concept in copyright law is that only the copyright holder—the person or organization that owns the work—can copy it. For instance, if you work for IBM, you can legally copy information from the IBM website and use it in other IBM documents. This reuse of information is routine because it helps ensure that the information a company distributes is both consistent and accurate.

However, if you work for IBM, you cannot simply copy information that you find on the Dell website and put it in IBM publications. Unless you obtained written permission from Dell to use its intellectual property, you would be infringing on Dell’s copyright.

Why doesn’t the Dell employee who wrote the information for Dell own the copyright to that information? The answer lies in a legal concept known as work made for hire. Anything written or revised by an employee on the job is the company’s property, not the employee’s.

Although copyright gives the owner of the intellectual property some rights, it doesn’t give the owner all rights. You can place small portions of copyrighted text in your own document without getting formal permission from the copyright holder. When you quote a few lines from an article, for example, you are taking advantage of an aspect of copyright law called fair use. Under fair-use guidelines, you have the right to use material, without getting permission, for purposes such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. Unfortunately, fair use is based on a set of general guidelines that are meant to be interpreted on a case-by-case basis. Keep in mind that you should still cite the source accurately to avoid plagiarism.

Determining Fair Use

Courts consider four factors in disputes over fair use:

The purpose and character of the use, especially whether the use is for profit. Profit-making organizations are scrutinized more carefully than nonprofits.
The nature and purpose of the copyrighted work. When the information is essential to the public—for example, medical information—the fair-use principle is applied more liberally.
The amount and substantiality of the portion of the work used. A 200-word passage would be a small portion of a book but a large portion of a 500-word brochure.
The effect of the use on the potential market for the copyrighted work. Any use of the work that is likely to hurt the author’s potential to profit from the original work would probably not be considered fair use.

A new trend is for copyright owners to stipulate which rights they wish to retain and which they wish to give up. You might see references to Creative Commons, a not-for-profit organization that provides symbols for copyright owners to use to communicate their preferences.

For more about documenting your sources, see Appendix, Part A.

Dealing with Copyright Questions

Consider the following advice when using material from another source.

Abide by the fair-use concept. Do not rely on excessive amounts of another source’s work (unless the information is your company’s own boilerplate).
Seek permission. Write to the source, stating what portion of the work you wish to use and the publication you wish to use it in. The source is likely to charge you for permission.
Cite your sources accurately. Citing sources fulfills your ethical obligation and strengthens your writing by showing the reader the range of your research.
Consult legal counsel if you have questions. Copyright law is complex. Don’t rely on instinct or common sense.

ETHICS NOTE

DISTINGUISHING PLAGIARISM FROM ACCEPTABLE REUSE OF INFORMATION

Plagiarism is the act of using someone else’s words or ideas without giving credit to the original author. It doesn’t matter whether the user of the material intended to plagiarize. Obviously, it is plagiarism to borrow or steal graphics, video or audio media, written passages, or entire documents and then use them without attribution. Web-based sources are particularly vulnerable to plagiarism, partly because people mistakenly think that if information is on the web it is free to borrow and partly because this material is so easy to copy, paste, and reformat.

However, writers within a company often reuse one another’s information without giving credit—and that is completely ethical. For instance, companies publish press releases when they wish to publicize news. These press releases typically conclude with descriptions of the company and how to get in touch with an employee who can answer questions about the company’s products or services. These descriptions, sometimes called boilerplate, are simply copied and pasted from previous press releases. Because these descriptions are legally the intellectual property of the company, reusing them in this way is completely honest. Similarly, companies often repurpose their writing. That is, they copy a description of the company from a press release and paste it into a proposal or an annual report. This reuse also is acceptable.

When you are writing a document and need a passage that you suspect someone in your organization might already have written, ask a more-experienced co-worker whether the culture of your organization permits reusing someone else’s writing. If the answer is yes, check with your supervisor to see whether he or she approves of what you plan to do.