Nothing new, in fact, already more than 3 years old, but still worth noting. All essays are available online.
The third edition of the ‘IRIE – International Review of Information Ethics’ (06/2005) and the first under its new title after having been renamed from IJIE (due to a name similarity with another infoethics journal) is dedicated to the focal subject “Search Engines”.In his essay “Funktionen, Probleme und Regulierung von Suchmaschinen im Internet (Function, Problems, and Regulation of Search Engines in the Internet – an extended abstract in English is enclosed)”, Christoph Neuberger reports on this debate in Germany as well as on the most recent results of the communication sciences. Furthermore, we publish an English translation of the “Code of Conduct” which also was developed in the context of the already mentioned research project. Important aspects like “Ethical and Political Issues in Search Engines” (Hinman), the necessity of the “Symmetry in Confidence” in search engines (Rieder), search engines and their relation to the “Ethical subject” (Blanke) and finally the “Problem of Privacy in Public” (Tavani) are treated by these four English contributions.
The issue is supplemented by two articles that do not fall under the focus of ‘search engines’ but complement it in one or the other way. Thomas Hoeren argues in ‘Laws, Ethics and Electronic Commerce’ that the Internet is leading to a dematerialization, deterritorialization, extemporalisation and depersonalisation of law and thereby the legal system loses its traditional (Roman law) roots (person, space, time). Secondly, the ‘Attitudes of UK Librarians and Librarianship Students to Ethical Issues’ have been empirically examined by Kevin Ball and Charles Oppenheim.
