Growth of the Internet brings political issues

The notion that ideas can be protected or copyrighted has gone into disarray since the everyday use of the internet.  It is a war between producers, pirates, and consumers.  The article “Wired, The Free and the Unfree” demonstrates how ownership of intellectual property has become a very messy business.  The author promotes the idea that our society is what it is because the proprietors of these concepts had the ability to benefit from, and exploit its success. 

The author asks some great open-ended questions that I would like to bring into our discussion, discussing in more detail pirating music. 

-When does market protection become a monopoly?
-Who's to say when a discovery's social benefit outweighs an individual's reward?
-When is sharing stealing?
 
(Do the producers of the music industry have a monopoly over music consumer media?)
(Who is the authoritative voice over who benefits more: the person capitalizing on the idea or property, or the person learning or listening from the intellectual property… Who benefits more, and merits its reward?)
(Regards to the music industry; peer to peer websites are a dime a dozen and the music industry can’t keep up on keeping them down… When do you think sharing is stealing?)
 
In the first link Wired gives a map, labeling parts of the world in this “digital war”.  Did you notice the United States was dark blue…?  Our society thrives on control of intellectual property; government officials highly advocate copyrights and patents.  Do you disagree or agree with this analysis? 
 
            The invention of peer to peer programs was a huge milestone in the development of the internet, Napster created a file sharing program (that many would mimic) that would infringe on copyright and patent laws throughout the entire world as shown in “Streaming Media”, although the U.S. advocates copyrights and patents, it has the highest rate of piracy through p2p programs in audio, images, video, and software. 
 
(*Because there is so much information in this article I decided to focus on the music industry, because I think that it is what “we” as students can mostly associate ourselves with… I mean C’mon.. Who doesn’t have Morpheus or something similar on their own computer; It is possible one of you may even be pirating music right now…)
 
I’ve included a link to the RIAA, The Recording Industry Association of America, heading the war on piracy.   http://www.riaa.com/default.asp
 
The author pokes fun at this concept of patents when he says the man who invented farming should’ve put a patent on it, and our culture would’ve never moved past Hunting and Gathering.  The article closes with how “open sourcing” has affected our society in so many ways. 


“The Digital Divide: It's Still There” poses some alarming statistics regarding the exposure of computers and the internet to different ethnic groups. 2 of every 3 white students use the internet, but less than half of blacks and hispanics use the internet. Anyone can see how this could promote huge barriers in the work race for minorities.

Also, it is noted that although there are advances for internet use during school; only 54% of white students use the internet at home, while appx 26% of black or hispanic kids do. This is more troublesome than you would initially think, because our education system is beginning to expect the use of the internet. In today's classroom you are certainly expected to have use of the internet. This is interesting because the inernet it becoming expected of students... Do you think it is in our near future for textbooks to be obsolete?


“Wallflower at the Web Party”

One major problem of Friendster was it was not very functioning. It could take up to 40 seconds to load the web site. Friendster wasn't prepared for the massive response it got, and regardless of the amount of money and talent- it became an example of disaster within the social networking sites. Friendster certainly had some huge power players in Silicon Valley, but through mostly functional error, Friendster lost its popularity. One finger is pointed at the fact that most of the men on the Friendster board were in their 50's, much older than their primary demographic... Do you think this made a huge difference, after reading this article, why do you think Friendster failed? Or do you think it failed at all? The Ceo of Friendster said that every company has a “MySpace”, or a similar competitor. After all, Friendster has 15 million users all over the world, under most umbrellas this would be considered successful.