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Past research in this area has predominantly revolved around ethics in IS (Banerjee, Cronan, & Jones, 1998; S. Harrington, 1996; Leonard & Cronan, 2001). Ethics according to these studies refers to informal norms and behaviors that may help deal with situations for which there are no formal rules or policies (Dhillon & Backhouse, 2000). A limitation in this line of research is that there is a general difficulty in classifying behaviors as being ethical or unethical. It is not always straightforward. According to prior studies (Calluzzo & Cante, 2004), some undesirable behaviors related to use of organizational IT property were viewed as being neither ethical nor unethical. An example of such behaviors is downloading files at the workplace or at an educational institution from the Internet for personal use.
Some work has investigated the issue of training employees on how to integrate ethics into decision making and behavior related to the recommended use of computers (Harrington & McCollum, 1990). Anderson et al. (1993) focused on the practical implications of the ACM code of ethics, with a number of illustrative case studies. There has also been some extensive research done in the area of computer and cyber-crime (Cymru, 2006; Kshetri, 2006; Tavani, 2000). Braunfeld and Wells (2001) provide a concise introduction to issues such as copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Digital Rights Management, alongside their legal ramifications have also been discussed (Camp, 2003; Gibbs, 2000; Liu, Safavi-Naini, & Sheppard, 2003).