Impacts of Computing, Ethics, and Professional Practice
What Domain 6 tests
Impacts of Computing, Ethics, and Professional Practice asks you to reason about consequences, not just recall definitions. Items cover privacy, bias, accessibility, the digital divide, intellectual property, licensing, school law such as FERPA and COPPA, and professional codes such as the ACM Code of Ethics.
Core rules
- Copyright protects original expression fixed in a medium; it does not protect ideas, facts, or short phrases. Fair use is a four-factor legal defense, not a general permission slip.
- Open-source licenses grant specific freedoms. Permissive licenses (MIT, Apache 2.0) allow proprietary reuse with conditions; copyleft licenses such as GPL require derivative distributions to use the same license.
- Publicly visible online content is not automatically public domain. Attribution satisfies some licenses but does not cure a license violation.
- FERPA protects education records and gives parents or eligible students rights; COPPA requires verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13 in covered online services.
- Ethical practice includes informed consent, minimizing collected data, disclosing conflicts, testing for bias, and reporting vulnerabilities responsibly.
Worked example
A school team modifies a GPL-licensed grading tool and distributes the modified version to other districts. Because GPL is copyleft, distributing the derivative generally requires making the corresponding source available under GPL terms. Using the tool internally without distribution is different from distributing it; the trigger is distribution, not merely modification.
Traps
Do not equate “free to download” with “open source,” or “on the web” with “public domain.” Legality and ethics overlap but are not identical: an action can be legal yet unfair or harmful. A Creative Commons NonCommercial license is not a blanket school license; read the specific terms. Also, anonymizing data is harder than deleting names-combinations of fields can re-identify people.