Since Computer Ethics is empirically grounded, Information Ethics must lay the foundation for a sensible analysis of typical case studies: it must be sound. The most obvious of our conditions, soundness, excludes trivial methodologies, like that in which each statement is deemed to be true (this would satisfy the remaining three conditions). It needs to be stated, therefore, only because of the rigorous nature of the methodology.
The seemingly simple condition of soundness has shaped the approach we take. For it implies that there must be a place in Information Ethics for codification of certain of our values: those we employ when calibrating the sense of an example. One person's junk email is another's treasured correspondence; so any foundation for Computer Ethics must be able to draw that distinction. No absolute interpretation can alone be sufficient, any more than it is in standard Ethics. Levels of reasoning must be possible, with rules of finer detail overriding more general ones.
This important point can be clarified by the following example. Suppose we design a virus to attack all computers on the net. It has the property that at say the dawn of 2000 the picture of Mona Lisa appears, in some encoded form, distributed throughout the world's filestores. Your computer may contain part of her left eyebrow but in a form unrecognisable to you, simply encoded in 0's and 1's. Locally, at each processor, my virus has increased entropy. But globally it has imposed structure where before there was none, and so has decreased entropy. Were that technique used to request help from extraterrestrial beings in the event of global disaster it would no doubt be regarded as beneficial; but as a ludic exercise it is evil. Ordinary judgement must be made taken into account before evil actions can be formalised in Cyberspace. Information Ethics shares this fundamental requirement with all other possible ethical approaches.