So, got like one topic to write about and that is Plagiarism...
What can I say about it? It get's you suspended from uni if they catch you doing it! So dont!
A more interesting topic that is sort of like plagiarism is copying stuff.. like music, movies and things like that. Have you ever done said thing? If you have, well, criminal!!!
They had this big site in Sweden (very popular and I won't give you the address) that got shut down a week or two ago. Consequently the Swedish police's website and the government website got DOSed (Denial of Service). Apparently the US government had put some preassure on the Swedish police/government to shut the site down and that was not popular at all.
The thing is though, that it took the site a couple of days to get up again, in a different country (actually a few of them for some redundancy) and all the effort spent to shut it down was wasted. Now if I were an artist och movie maker or something I would offcourse want money for the stuff I make so I would therefore be against all kinds of copying.. But, there is always a but, is making it harder to copy, shutting down sites, making stacks and stacks of people into criminals, putting out fake files with messages (Madonna) and tracking devices in them, the way to go?
I don't think so, take the Madonna example, there they put out this fake song that had the name of the real song but instead of music they got an angry Madonna telling them "What the F*** do you think your doing?!" now had I been someone that wanted to listen to a song and figure out if it would be worth buying the album... I would have said ^%#^%$ you Madonna and never bought anything of hers in my life. Now I'm not a Madonna fan and would never even go through the trouble of downloading a song of hers, but that is beside the point. So I don't think this is an especially brilliant thing to do... Unless you want to loose customers (fans?).
Neither do I think putting all this effort and money into copy protection is especially brilliant either as there will always be someone that manages to crack it and the one's that generally get hurt by it are the ones that actually go and buy the CD (or whatever it is).
And buying songs online? Well paying almost as much as you would for a CD, without getting a cd case, an actual nice looking cd or a little book with the lyrics? On top of that you can only copy the song about 3 times (depending on where you buy it from).
Why not try and find the REAL problem? The real problem is not that people copy things, it is WHY people copy things...
My theory (most probably flawed but still a theory) is that people copy because:
- It is cheap (can't competed with $0)
- It is convinient (you can get any song)
- They don't want to give money to the record companies (artist ok, record company bad)
- There are more smurfs then there are smurfettes (?)
- Organise some kind of organisation that may be run by all the record companies around where almost EVERY song that is or have been released is available. Now places like napster (which is a pretty good online music store) or any other onine music store, can use that DB and for every song people buy they pay a certain fee to the main company.
- Not putting any restrictions on the files
- Selling them rather cheap (better to sell many cheap than a few expensive as a famous artis will get more people on their concerts)
- Reward people for buying stuff (if you buy 50 songs you get something cool)
2 comments:
I think if record companies were serious about stopping piracy they'd start embedding malicious viruses in every CD sold.
I think if the police were serious about stopping people speeding they'd drive around in unmarked cars flashing their headlights at people - everyone slows down when they see the universal signal for the "speed camera"
I read a very interesting article that pointed out something I found most interesting. Once a file (song, movie, html, Word, exe, etc) is digitised is it nothing more than a number. A very big number, but a number none the less. What makes that number interesting is that an interpreter (mp3 player, Word, etc) can use that number to produce something interesting.
Now here's the bit I found most interesting. In its raw form, as a number, there is nothing about it that you can protect. Its indefensible to copywrite or protect a number.
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