Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/University of California, Berkeley/Politics of Digital Piracy (Spring 2013)/Week 7 assignment

Wikipedia Project Proposal

 * Firstly, make sure you look at these brief guides to navigating Wikipedia, as they are very important in order to not be very confused for this project:
 * Introduction
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page


 * This week we will begin exploring the topics of our semester-long Wikipedia project a little deeper. You will be expected to have the Wikipedia page you are significantly editing (or creating) chosen, and write a 250 proposal on what changes you will be making to the page.
 * The proposal will be posted on the Talk section of your Wikipedia User page. So when you login to your account, look on your upper-right to find the talk page, and then edit it to post your proposal.
 * The primary purpose for this week is to begin doing research on this topic, so I want you to have at least three outside sources on the topic that you will be using to get information, and based on the information you have learned, propose what you think could be added, changed, deleted, or has need of a citation on the already existing page.
 * As I mentioned before, if you are editing an existing Wiki page, at least 3 'major contributions' will have to be made to the page. Some of these major changes should include adding sections or sub-sections to the page that you think are essential to the overall knowledge of the topic.

Week 7: Musical Piracy and P2P Technology

 * Reading:
 * Adrian Johns, “History of Musical Piracy and P2P Technology”, Pop Music Pirate Hunters.
 * Lev Grossman, “The Men Who Stole The World”.


 * Suggested Reading:
 * “How the Internet Works” (especially the short section on P2P).
 * "Steal This Film" is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property and was a talking point in the British Documentary Festival.

If you are in group A, please post your reading responses here. There are no specific questions this week, but try to address your thoughts on whether or not you think file sharing should be illegal and why, whether or no it's stoppable, and how you think it might change in the future.
 * Reading Responses

What stuck out to me is the young age of the men who developed these websites and protocols. I find it important less because of their technical prowess for such a young age, and more because it shows the influence that youth can have on the way that the digital world operates. Specifically, these guys saw an opportunity to change how content is distributed and acted on it, making new systems that completely defied the traditional business practices that media companies employed. In this way, it proves to me that no business practice that centers around digital content can remain static - instead, companies must constantly be adapting to changing trends in how people distribute content, because young people will constantly be thwarting these business practices wherever they are able. Gloudas (talk) 06:27, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

As a follow-up to Gloudas's observation about the age of these purported copyright thwarters, I find it very interesting that people this young can, for example write the software to go around the DRM system in place. It either indicates that the R&D invested in the DRM of the DVD was not enough to keep those wanting to liberate the contents out, or it indicates that there is really no DRM scheme which relies on security through obscurity, in which the likes of a 14 or 18 year old will not be able to eventually figure out how the scheme works. Additionally I find it interesting that these peer-to-peer schemes being devised by the teenagers from the time article are forcing the music and film industries to scramble to patch their old-style business models for the post-internet world. Cp123127 (talk) 01:00, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

In the first article, I found it interesting that antipiracy action began through “commando” raids, which were described as being more pirate-like and illegal than anything done by smalltime hackers. Additionally, it struck me as unusual that the U.S. Government Accountability Office failed to “establish a strong link between piracy and lost sales,” as this is the primary argument put forth by anti-piracy organizations. Furthermore, it is very unscientific/unprofessional to begin research with the intention of affirming a pre-selected conclusion, so I wonder whether or not the study has been replicated or tested further. What intrigued me about the second article was that none of the Big 4 in piracy consider themselves to be pirates or even intended to do something so ambitious as take down the music industry. All of them were college (or high school) students, not too different from ourselves, seeking to develop practical solutions to problems they faced on a daily basis. Still, major media outlets such as Time magazine and Fortune rewarded them for their “illegal behavior” by transforming them into rockstars. What does this say about what mass culture in America really values? Editingcontent2 (talk) 06:30, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

How effective are these law suits against the ideas that these men created? In what is known as the Streisand effect, any attempt to ban/hide/remove some piece of information, or more relevant in this case, code, only increases the attention that it receives. The law suits initiated may kill the physical code that it is brought up against, but it cannot kill the idea behind the code nor the inspiration that the code creates (as we saw in the readings between Gnutella and Limewire). As technology evolves, man will always attempt to bypass the restrictions that the music and entertainment industry places on them. Will it always be a race/vicious cycle between the evolution of these ideas and the industry attempting to regulate them? RKan (talk) 09:00, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

I think that generally you will not be able to stop piracy, as it will generally just take on another form. The antiquated methodology of picking a small amount of pirates and slapping them with gratuitous fines, not only creates animosity but is very inefficient. People will continue to pirate because they realize that the chance of getting caught is very low. Rather the big music labels and industry at large should work much harder at working with ISPs to negotiate prices that would allow people access to music for something like a flat nominal rate. Services like Pandora and Spotify have already started moving in this direction. If you consider piracy as a sunk cost from this economic point of view and start trying to work around it, a second value to centralized music provided by ISPs would be that computers are also safer from things such as malware/spyware/viruses/etc. Radeonhead (talk) 00:27, 6 March 2013 (UTC)Benjamin Porter

I believe that file sharing should absolutely be legal. One of the side effects of persecuting file sharing is the persecution of awesome protocols like Bittorrent hindered at every turn by ISPs and Copyright Associations. I believe the market has changed, the way people choose to consume media has changed and the more the big companies fight against this new model, the more they will lose their audience. I believe platforms like Mega and Flattr where artists can connect directly to consumers. The internet has the function of simultaneously providing anonymity and connecting people that could not have otherwise been connected. It is now feasible for an artist to sell directly to his audience without a marketing company and people are much more willing to give actual people money than a faceless corporation. Additionally DRM is only effective when it provides such constraints upon the user that they must conform their use of the media to the DRM's will. This is going exactly against the social wave of change of freedom of consumption causing people to fight back against DRM even harder! With such a driving force and large enemy which DRM makes for itself, it is impossible that someone smarter than the DRM creator will attempt to crack it, MarkDavidoff UCB (talk) 00:28, 6 March 2013 (UTC) In the article “Pop music pirate hunters”, Adrian Johns talks in detail about the pirate’s believes, and actions, and states that “They are, they claim, bringing music to a vast public otherwise entirely unserved.”This statement as simple as it sounds might be the major contribution the pirates make to the society. For example listening to classical music pieces which are educational, and anyone should have access to them, used to be a privilege before 20th Century when there was restrictive copyright laws. In late 19th Century, copyright laws form, and as a result of these laws that forbid people access to music, pirates are created. “Photolithography”, and “Pianomania” (Adrian Johns, 68) made piracy possible. Photolithography was a technological boost in the 19th Century that made possible for the pirates to replicate original songs, and Pianomania, a period when music becomes only for people that own a “piano” and someone that plays it, made music an even higher privilege, and therefore a demand for cheaper music was inevitable. In the 17th Century access to music was free to everyone, and concepts such as copyright, and piracy were unknown to people. In other words, piracy, and copyright laws are complementary. If there wasn’t a restriction to access music, there wouldn’t be ways to go around those laws. However, the subject of piracy is multidimensional, and there are strong counter views that are valid as well. An example is in case of the publisher, David Day who was an anti-pirate, and after several attempts was able to identify his own pirates. His as well as Abbot’s efforts resulted in “the passing of musical copyright law in October of 1902.”(Adrian Johns. 70) Sheeveed (talk) 02:43, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

It is the young and ambitious minds that have left an indelible mark on the digital-media industry of the 21st century. These young men and women are natural born entrepreneurs, striving for disruption and universal reach through minimal cost technologies. They are all very smart individuals, with many of them holding formal degrees, although a number have left college for larger endeavors. They recognize the new era that we have moved into, and have taken it upon themselves to be the pioneers of these technologies. Programs like Napster have entirely reshaped the industry from the ground up, and have truly left an eternal impact on the digital media industry. It is the newcomers who have the same vision and motivation that their predecessors: these men who played a crucial role in the development of Internet technologies, that will go on to disrupt the current way of doing things and provide a fresh approach to problem solving in the future times to come. IanElli (talk) 22:13, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

If you are in Group B, please post your current event here. In order to make the title of the article a link, do as follows: [www.thisisthelinktomycurrentevent.com "My Current Event"] Please note that there is just one space between the link and the quotation mark enclosing the title. As with the reading response, just sign your name next to you article by typing four of these: ~ (4 tildes).
 * Current Events

http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-punishes-bittorrent-pirates-with-browser-hijack-130227/ Pphan1991 (talk) 02:27, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Hackers-Clip-Evernote-Forcing-50M-Password-Resets-77442.htmlPringles012 (talk) 09:19, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/white-house-consumers-should-be-allowed-to-unlock-cellphones-for-service-switches/2013/03/04/3477a930-84fd-11e2-999e-5f8e0410cb9d_story.html Chadyy (talk) 18:40, 5 March 2013 (UTC)Chadyy

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/02/27/music-sales-up-for-first-time-in-a-more-than-a-decade Tigstep (talk) 23:33, 5 March 2013 (UTC)tigstep

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/02/27/music-sales-up-for-first-time-in-a-more-than-a-decade ORambo (talk) 23:45, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

"Here’s what an actual “six strikes” copyright alert looks like: Ars asks and Comcast obliges, giving us copies of Alerts 1, 2, 4, and 5." Adrianvallence (talk) 00:02, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-new-live-streaming-platform-130312/ Dkingg