Monday, March 7, 2011

updates

sorry i did not do this by friday, but here is info about the most recent assignment

a redefined thesis statement:
1. I am researching digital piracy, which is the distribution and downloading of illegal software, music, games, or any other digital resource that can be shared. I plan to discuss the history of how this phenomenon has come about and the positive aspects of digital piracy. (positive aspects are usually not regarded and are frowned upon)

goals for my project:
2. i have a few different goals for my project. the first one is using the sources i have, and finding new ones that have enough facts and ideas that correspond what i want to write about. i have found A LOT of good information, and i know there is much more available due to the topic of my research. it seems easy to find info about the negative views of digital piracy, but i think i want to focus on positive views to write about something different...it could be due to the fact that i am an advocate for the downloading and sharing of digital resources. another goal is the act of writing my paper and getting it started. i love to write, and know that once i write the first couple paragraphs it opens my mind to everything i want to write about. i guess writing my full thesis of my paper would be that goal. i am about there with what i want my thesis to be, i think i need to narrow it down still a little more and find a target i want to focus on.

good sources
i dont have 15 to list right now because i have been focusing on the ones i have and there is a lot to read..but here is 10 very good sources

1. Andreas Fuchs, Man on a Mission. Film Journal International 113 no12 D 2010 p. 48-9. Nielsen Business Publications, New York.

This article is about the Motion Picture Association International (MPA). A lot of it mentions different statistics of illegal movie downloads/sales/replications. The reason why I like this source is it has a bar graph titled “Dollars lost in International markets” which I think is pretty interesting. Then there are 3 pie graphs about the “Pirate Profile” which shows age groups, geography, and gender. He makes the point that as the Internet reaches out to different parts of the world and becomes more accessible that pirating will only sky rocket.

2. Michael Strangelove, The Empire of Mind: Digital piracy and the anti-capitalist movement. University of Toronto Press Inc 2005.

I haven't read all of this yet because it is a book...but i have read a few of the chapters and some of it is very good. It talks about how the times have changed in media, and how the digital age has changed young people that use these products. He goes into detail about a study by ABC, NBC, CBS, Time Warner, and New York Times focusing on new media and personal computers affecting the audiences behavior. Some parts of this really sparked my interest because I am a part of that audience.

3. Julia King, Pirates. Computerworld. 9/14/2009, Vol. 43 Issue 26, p. 19-22

First paragraph states that 2 out of 10 people that work in a corporations use software illegally.
Another interesting part of is in the first six months of this year (2009), the BSA’s manager of Internet Investigations, sent more than 2 million takedown notices to Internet Service Providers. These ISP’s had to pull the plug on sites that allow peer-to-peer networking of sharing illegal software. the whole article is like this and will probably be very useful, however it is not that long, only 4 pages.

4. Ramnath K. Chellappa & Shivendu Shivendu, Economics of Technology Standards: Implications for Offline Movie Piracy in a Global Context. University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

This article focuses on how technology has changed the way digital piracy is becoming more and more rampant. Research is given that identifies conditions under which consumers will engage in global and regional piracy. this paper is alight, the first two pages has some good information but it starts to get into an equation about getting the price of copying movies.

5. Arun Sundararajan, Managing Digital Piracy: Pricing, Protection and Welfare. New York University, New York.

This paper focuses on how rising digital piracy can make a seller’s pricing power increasingly limited by the quality and availability of pirated copies. The second part of the paper focuses on about studies technology-based protection against digital piracy, which is typically achieved by implementing digital rights management (DRM) systems.

6. Chao Zhang, Unraveling the BitTorrent Ecosystem. IEEE. 2009.

This journal is very detailed and filled with great information. It was written by a by a PHD student that specifically studies distributed and software systems and peer-to-peer networking.
It describes the bitTorrent “ecosystem” and gets into great detail about how torrent files are used, processed, and shared...not to mention the most common torrent servers, how much traffic passes through, and the other details of that nature. This journal also has many graphs, tables, and figures that help explain the bitTorrent system.

7. David Alan Grier, Long John Software and the Digital Jolly Roger. IEEE, George Washington University. 2008.

This journal focuses on software piracy straight forward. There is a small story about a man who sells things out of the back of his car as it relates to software piracy...but it goes on to give facts about piracy in general. The journal has facts like this, “A report from the Business Software Alliance notes that across the globe, $2 in illegal software is racked up for every $1 in legitimate sales.” it goes on to talk about how software piracy is a long-term problem and where its expected to go in the future.

8. Atanu Lahiri, Revisiting the Incentive to Tolerate Illegal Distribution of Software Products. hicss, pp.1-9, 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 2011.

This is a pretty awesome journal because it has the point of view that i do - that there are positive trade-offs associated with the illegal distribution of software products. however, he tries to make the point that illegal distribution leads to more users, magnifies positive network effects, and creates a greater demand for the legal version. but he does examine both sides of illegal downloads, instead of most people writing only about the negative aspects.

9. Marc Fetscherin, Sabrina Zaugg, Music Piracy on Peer-to-Peer Networks. pp.431-440, 2004 IEEE International Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce and e-Service. 2004.

this article talks in depth about downloading music and how its affecting the industry. this is the first article I’ve been looking at the focuses purely on the illegal music distribution compared to the software distribution. it is argued that peer-to-peer networks such as KaZaA, Morpheus, iMesh, or Audiogalaxy are an enormous threat to their business. They furthermore blame these networks for their recent decline in sales figures.

10. Yoichiro Itakura, Makoto Yokozawa, Takeshi Shinohara, Model Analysis of Digital Copyright Piracy on P2P Networks. saint-w, pp.84, 2004 Symposium on Applications and the Internet-Workshops (SAINT 2004 Workshops), 2004.

This one focuses on how the distribution of copyrighted material through the Internet has been infested with piracy in reality. Infringement of copyright law on peer-to-peer networks has been growing and making it nearly impossible to get an accurate estimate of the amount of pirated materials that is being transmitted. the point of the journal is trying to answer these two questions, What is the amount of illegally copied material necessary to dent production incentives? and What is the price society will have to pay to minimize the spread of illegally copied works?


Monday, February 28, 2011

motion picture association of america

I forgot to post about this website that i found last week and thought was cool - it is mpaa.org

it has a lot of links to other sites about internet piracy/copyright infringement, copyright information, laws, and basically everything that has to do with movie piracy


enjoy

my research

I have been pretty horrible about updates on my blog about my research and how it is going...

here is what i have been doing lately


I mentioned in an early post that I have been looking at journals from the UVU library. I have continued to search throughout some of those databases...i have been searching for articles using keywords like: internet piracy, digital piracy, bittorrent(s), music/movie counterfeiting, downloading music/movies, illegal downloads, and other areas of that nature

I have also been using google scholar to search for articles/journals. I have been searching the same sort of keywords, trying different searched with the advanced search feature.

i really like google scholar because of the variety of different responses i get. however, many times when i click on a link to an article, it will not give me access unless i purchase it or something like that. that is where the uvu library helps out, because it gives you access to many databases i normally would have access to.

after many different searches using different keywords, i have downloaded many pdf's and saved links to articles/journals and google books that have to do with my topic

i have been reading them and searching each one for topics which i feel will help me learn more.

many of the comments i have gotten have helped me in my search for information and given me ideas on what i want to be researching about. so thank you for those


as far as my annotated bibliography goes - i have posted anything yet about any of these articles but i have written down a few notes about them...i am going to start making a post for each article/journal/book i look into - every post's title will be the title of the article and i will write shorty about what is in the article/what i learned/what i could use - also provide a link if i can


Tuesday, February 15, 2011

atdhe.net back in action!

to all those who were users of ATDHE.Net before and have been saddened by the recent seize of the domain by the government...it is time to be happy again because they are back.


after the domain was seized by the government, they released it under a .me address. addresses ending in .me mean that the top level domain is in montenegro. since 2008, .me has been made available at all registrars.

a bitTorrent website that i am a member of called demonoid.com, recently changed their domain to an .me, there new address being http://www.demonoid.me

i'm guessing there are different laws/regulations on websites running through the montenegro top level domain??? i am going to research more about this now

Monday, February 14, 2011

internet piracy

So from reading some of your comments, and pondering where my interests are...i decided that writing about internet piracy is my new goal.

In todays world this has become a big issue due to the rise of the internet, its availability, and the use of the personal computer. the generation i grew up in developed napster which changed file sharing over the internet forever. i have used these kind of programs my whole life and been a part of the pirating revolution. i think that it is only right that i would research and write about something i care about and have been dealing with for many years. internet piracy is one of the reasons i have used computers since i was a kid and know so much today. i can say that it has opened me up to a world of knowledge on the computer and lead me to major in an area dealing with computer networking.

i have always felt that software, music, and video should be free to be shared across the internet. i know the law is different, and many of the creators of this media highly disagree because of their greed. however, i do feel very strongly about this subject and am excited to learn more.

i have begun research through the uvu library - looking up journals written about internet piracy, file sharing, and bit torrents. using bit torrents is the most common way of sharing software, music, videos, games today...

i have found a really good journal about bit torrents, describing it as "the most successful open Internet application for content distribution." it goes into great detail about the how bit torrents work, and gives much data concerning statistics of users, uploaders, downloaders, and hosts. it also talks about the most common websites used and different search engines used for downloading/uploading torrents

another great journal i found talks about of sharing music and movies over the internet. it points out how reduced sizes of music/video files due to compression technologies has allowed for piracy to become a rampant problem on the Internet even in the absence of significant bandwidth. it exams how corporations have changed physical digital media in different parts of the world to slow down/prevent piracy...

here is a link to an article talking about the "right" to digital media, it discusses a lot of issues that have been going on in the media about copyrights, laws, and other aspects that go into piracy




Tuesday, February 1, 2011

a perfect example

tonight in class i went to a website that i use a lot to watch live sporting events. the website usually has a list of different television networks and you can watch live tv. when i tried to go on to watch a basketball game, this was displayed:


how lame...but i think it is very interesting, and want to know more about whats happening to these websites

Monday, January 31, 2011

network & internet security

Collins Huish
IS Capstone
Emphases: Comp. Networking
& Bus. Management

Working on my Thesis

i have decided to research on internet and network security

i want to research stories that have impacted large companies and find out what went wrong


as far my thesis goes, i'm not sure what it will consist of yet...but this is what i plan to research and look at to try and find a thesis:

- scholarly journals about network security
- conferences about network security
- news articles about corporations and network security scandals

another topic that has some to do with the internet and security is pirating. i grew up sharing music and watched the rise/fall of napster and how sharing music has led to sharing software, movies, and much more. recently there has been court hearings concerning such matters and websites have been taken directly off the world wide web.

here is a link to a bill that has been trying to get passed in the past two years about copyright infringement - http://www.eff.org/coica

this is all for now.