Active Telecom, a major cell phone manufacturer, recently released a new model of its highly successful brand of cell phones. Your client, a competing cell phone maker, immediately broke open one of these new models to see how the components are arranged and integrated together.
a. Your client hopes to use this information to make a competing cell phone, without having to incur substantial research and development costs. Is this ethical?
b. Assume instead that your client is a hedge fund rather than a competing cell phone manufacturer. It broke open one of these models to identify the suppliers of the components used in this phone, so it can buy the stock of these supplier companies before others in the stock market realize that these suppliers' stock price will be increasing as a result of them generating substantial increases in sales due to this new phone's expected popularity. Is this ethical?