In this age of radical transparency, can corporations that mistreat their users or cause harm in the world get away with it? Does the market discipline companies so that responsibility is now an essential part of doing business? Or is corporate responsibility just a clever trick to gain a slight marketing advantage and defer state regulation? Is the first and only duty of a company to provide value to its shareholders? This talk will consider these issues through the lens of Google, the most significant promoter of a corporate moral ethos. It will consider the ethics of doing business in authoritarian places such as China, pursuing environmentally sustainable infrastructure, and treating labor fairly.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia and the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001), The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004), and The Googlization of Everything -- and Why We Should Worry (University of California Press, 2011).