Copyright & Me

When talking about copyright you have to remember that it is an ongoing debate with various people against copyright laws and others in defence of copyright laws. Copyright is defined as a form of intellectual property which gives the creator of an original work or copyright owner exclusive rights for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation; after which time the work is said to enter the public domain.

Some of the reasons why people may be against copyright laws is that a lot of people feel that copyright poses problems for online culture. Cory Doctrow looks at issues with copyright and why it shouldn’t be a problem. He makes an argument for the inappropriate application of copyright to the internet. His definition of culture is shared information; all the conversing, retelling, singing, acting out, drawing and thinking is culture. Doctrow says ‘On the Internet, copying is automatic, massive, instantaneous, free, and constant’. The reason for this is because we live in a culture where we share information and the reason why copyright is valuable is because culture exists. ‘If there was no market for creative works, there'd be no reason to care about copyright’. (Doctrow)
Another point people against copyright would make is that there is no difference between lending out a CD or a DVD to a friend and sharing a file with them. It is not copyright to lend someone a CD but as soon as a computer and the internet is involved it is; why is this? A lot of people would also agree with Doctorow’s ideas that copyright doesn’t actually work in practice because ‘No matter how hard you adhere to them, you're probably breaking the law’, so why not just do it anyway?

People for copyright are mostly those who are publishers or creators of content. They are for copyright as they feel these laws will protect people from their work and also protect their wallets, as they do no get paid for work that is copied. Some companies and organisations use the term ‘fair use’, which means using someone else’s documents or work without making it useful for money or making a profit unless you’ve required the permission from the rights holders. The only problem with this term is that most people that download do it for personal and social reasons; it only applies to people who do not intend to make copies to sell them, which means that publishers and creators still loose out on money as their product is still being circulated. However Doctrow would argue that fair use is something positive for producers as ‘it would become more popular the more people share it’.

I personally think that file sharing shouldn’t be a problem as long as people aren’t doing it to make a profit. I agree with Doctrow when he says that culture is shared information and that if file sharing was banned and taken off the internet, culture would die with it as the internet is how people communicate and express ideas to one another. I personally know that my friends and I are always sharing music files, and why shouldn’t we? We aren’t harming anyone by sharing the music we love between one another. When I copy a movie from a friend’s pc it’s not because I have an ulterior motive but simply because I want to see a film. I will copyfight till the end because I don’t want the internet to loose its culture.

Psychogeography Project

Psychogeography is the idea about finding out how the environment we live in shapes our behaviour. "The Study of specific affects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals" (Guy Debord, 1958). Pychogeography shows how humans shape the environment they live in and also how the environment shapes them. Whilst travelling, we see many things which we would either class as every day things we see or there are things that we would never notice. Considering these things can gives us a sense of feeling of the area or place we are in. The derive which means 'drifting' in French is a term which means going to places unplanned. When we take a different route to our normal ones it allows us to explore the area around us and discover new places. If you pay more attention while on your everyday routes, you will notice more things about the place where you are. These could be small things like a sign or a poster or larger things like a person that travels at exactly the sae time as you everyday. There are many different Psychogeography techniques that can be explored, however I didn't really understand how it all worked until we did our own.

At first we didnt know how to start our journey, but then we came up with the idea of covering more than one route as we realised that in Leicester all routes to town ended up at the Clocktower. We chose to focus on the four main routes that led to the clocktower. As we walked the routes we decided that we would take pictures or make sketches of interesting things that we hadn't noticed on our journey before. We also decided to take pictures of iconic buildings that would help people recognise where they are in town.

We presented our route to the class in the form of a map on a board where we highlighted our chosen routes. We then stuck our images around the board and used pins to locate their exact point on the map. We also produced a video of one of the routes that was taken. Below is an image of our map.

We also put the pictures we took into a slideshow for each route. Below are all four of them.

Route 1


Route 2


Route 3


Route 4

Web 2.0: Pecha Kucha Presentation

We recently had a lecture on what is web 2.0?
Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web
1.0 to deliver rich user experiences (Tim O’reilly). He explained that there are 7 principles of web 2.0, these are:
1. The Web As Platform
2. Harnessing collective intelligence
3. Data is the next Intel inside
4. End of the software release cycle
5. Light weight programming models
6. Software above the level of a single device
7. Rich user experiences

Before web 2.0 there was the web 1.0 which was created by Tim Burton. The problems of the early web were:
- Copyright (However it is still a problem with web 2.0)
- Searching and indexing page contents
- Technical skills to publish online
- Lack of social involvement

After learning about web 2.0 in lectures we were given the task of creating a presentation in the style of pecha kucha about one aspect of web 2.0. Pecha kucha is a way of structuring a presentation so that it is economical and to the point; no one wants to sit and listen to something that’s going to run on forever. Typically a pecha kucha presentation would consist of 20 slides and each would be shown for 20 seconds. However our presentation will be 5 minutes long and contains 15 slides. Each slide will still be shown for 20 seconds and the aspect of web 2.0 which we chose to present to the class was Network Effects. As there was four of us in the group we decided that everyone would have 3 dedicated slides each and that we would discuss the first two slides as a group.

Network effects refer to an environment where an increase in adoption and/or usage creates more value for all participants in a social community or network. In relation to web 2.0 an example would be social network sites, as the more people that sign up and use the website the more valuable it is to each person. There are different types of network effects, these are:
-direct: when the product or service value increases the more people use it
-indirect: when an increase in the use of a product or service creates increased value for complimentary products resulting in added value for the original product or service.
-social: when an increase in use by one group of users increases the value of a complementary product or service in a completely different set of users
-Two-sided: when groups of people come together in the online world

Network effects

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