Piracy in China

For my final Blog entry i will be looking at a scholarly article in my inquiry area. I can across this article in the Journal of Strategic Information Systems and found it interesting. I came to the conclusion that the article was scholarly when it met several criteria. First of all the journal is peer review which is always a relatively good indicator that it is scholarly. While none of the authors are doctorates, they are experts in their field. It's also important to not that doctorates aren't common in this field.

This article is about anti-piracy strategies in China. In particular it looks at the open source strategy otherwise known as OS strategy. They find in their study that is a relatively effective strategy at preventing piracy. They also find that this is a feasible option for groups wanting to prevent piracy. The authors conclude with the fact that open source strategy can work, but it will not work uniformly across the board. I feel like the authors used rhetoric to make the reader want to try this strategy. They use almost all positive terms when describing this strategy. It’s almost as if they are marketing a product and the audience is groups against piracy.

Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com.lib-ezproxy.tamu.edu:2048/science/article/pii/S0963868709000420#sec4

Why Piracy is a Growing Problem

I have decided to talk about piracy again this week. I picked this cartoon to start with because I think this I how most of society feels about piracy. Most people do not take this problem seriously, you can tell by this cartoon. Most people feel like piracy is a joke and that no one really gets in trouble for it. Why do people fell like this is not a serious crime?

I think it goes back to the commercial I analyzed 2 weeks ago. People do not feel like they will get caught. It also has to do with the fact that there is no visible human harm when pirating something. If you were going to steal a purse from someone or even a car, you would have to at least somewhat consider who you were stealing it from. You would have to look at them as a human and then take the object. This is not the case with piracy; let’s look at music piracy for an example. If you are going to pirate a song, you don’t have to look at who you are stealing it from. I think this makes a huge difference; people are more likely to do something when no one is watching them. I think this is why piracy is becoming such a huge problem. People don’t feel like it’s wrong because there is no human connection

Sources used:

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=piracy&hl=en&sa=X&rlz=1C1SKPC_enUS354US354&biw=1280&bih=685&tbm=isch&prmd=imvnsub&tbnid=ArRq_o43sH9XAM:&imgrefurl=http://www.answers.com/topic/piracy&docid=C2KTn2SJ67MWxM&imgurl=http://content.answcdn.com/main/content/img/CDE/_TOON15.GIF&w=429&h=361&ei=SCe3TuCjEIzksQKTqantAw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=182&vpy=222&dur=149&hovh=206&hovw=245&tx=122&ty=84&sig=108616107616377738607&page=1&tbnh=142&tbnw=169&start=0&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:12,s:0

Intellectual Property Rights

This video is a couple years old, but I think it is applicable to today’s discussion about intellectual property rights. The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, is talking about how his company looks at intellectual property rights. He is referring to Google books when it came out. He says that there should be a way for all industries to set up something like iTunes. I think this is interesting, because he was basically foreshadowing what was to come in the movie and television industry.

I am talking about the dawn of streaming online movies and television. You can now go to Netflix or Amazon instant video and watch thousands of movies. These companies jump through multiple hoops to attain the rights to stream these movies. I think that this is ridiculous; they should have a model in place that makes it easy for the consumer to access the movies. I don’t know much about Netflix, but I am an Amazon customer and I have recently started using the streaming videos. While I enjoy it, but I would like more selection. I think that the movie industry should work with both companies to make it easier for consumers to get their products. Would it really be that difficult if you factored it in from the beginning?

Rhetoric in Anti-piracy Ad

The creators of this ad made certain assumptions about the audience when they produced this video. They start the video with a girl downloading a movie online. They then start making claims about her, but they are actually appealing to digital natives. They claim that she wouldn’t steal a car, which is probably a safe assumption. It is only an assumption however. They are assuming that viewers are law abiding citizens. While that would be nice, not everyone follows the law. I also think they did a poor job of backing up their claims. You see people doing the acts that are illegal and basically getting away with it. Do you see police chasing them or them getting arrested? Nope, maybe this is why this video seems so ineffective.

The lack of ground and evidence in this video make the warrants very hard to see. I think the warrants are that everyone knows that stealing is wrong. They try and connect car theft and stealing a purse to piracy, and it is somewhat ineffective. I think it’s different because they aren’t the same type of crime. There is no personal connection when someone pirates something, it is just convenient. I think connecting to personal crimes could have been more effective if they had shown the people getting caught.

I know that I said I was going to talk about piracy this week but a historical event happened this Friday I have opted to talk about it. This Friday President Obama made the decision to seen 100 troops to Africa to remove Joseph Kony from the battle field. For those of you who don’t know Joseph Kony is the leader of the LRA a group that kidnaps children and turns them into soldiers. The group Invisible Children had a vital role in getting congress to pass this bill.

Invisible Children’s mission statement reads: Invisible Children uses film, creativity, and social action to end the use of child soldiers in Joseph Kony’s rebel war and to restore LRA-affected communities in central Africa to peace and prosperity. Here is video about them:

Invisible Children: WHO WE ARE from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

This is a movement of digital natives using technology to change the world. It all started with a video, a video that has been shown all over the country in order to raise awareness about his human problem. They have used the internet to rally the movement and create events in support of this cause. This organization does a great job of giving supporters regular updates via the web. They have used technology to spread the word and they were the main force behind getting this done.

The founders used film and their creativity to have an impact on the world. They even used a creative film to declare victory and ask their supporter to thank the President.

They have really shown how the generation of digital natives can use technology to change the world. They have truly used digital rhetoric to impact millions of people.

Are Piracy Laws Working?

I this week’s post I will compare two different blog postings about piracy. I chose to use John Palfrey from the Harvard School of Law and the Digital Natives Blog which is a project of the Berkman Center. While both blogs are affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman center they use very different types of rhetoric to make their point to the reader.

John Palfrey mainly appeals to logos in his blog post: Cary Sherman, Lewis Hyde in Chat about RIAA’s AntiPiracy Campaign. He wants the entire regulation system for peer to peer networks to seem completely ridiculous. Palfrey uses logical facts to appeal to the reader. He also uses an irritated tone to make the audience feel that the system is crazy. He is appeal to the reader’s logic when he says: “The recording industry regularly asks colleges to police their students in regard to infringement. Why is it the task of colleges to do this police work, rather than the police?” Palfrey want the reader to realize how absurd the regulation system is.

The author of the Digital Natives Blog: Pirates, peers and intellectual property, appeals mainly to pathos. The use stories to communicate their views about piracy. The reference many other works in the blog and uses quotes that make the reader look differently a peer to peer networks. They tell the story of the history of copyright to give the audience a frame of reference. They want the reader to look at the laws original intentions and see that they no longer apply.

In conclusion both blogs used different rhetorical methods of getting the same point across. One blog used pathos and the other used logos, but they both made the reader feel that the piracy laws are not working. Next week I will look at the effect piracy is having on digital natives culture.

Recession Cartoon

I think the artist was trying to appeal to pathos in this picture. He wants the reader to feel a sense of helplessness when they realize how this picture applies to them. He illustrated this family living in a cave because that is how many families that have been hit hard by the recession feel. They feel cold and are just trying to get through one day at a time. The family is huddled together to give the view a sense of the fact that family is always important. It is important that they are asking the grandfather to tell them a story since story telling is such a ritual of the past. They are reaching for any shred of normalcy in these harsh times.

The cartoonist put the cave drawing in such close proximity to illustrate how they are dreaming and hoping for better times. They remember when they had a real house and were displaced and huddling together for warmth. I think interesting that their do not appear to be parents in the picture. I think that the fire signifies hope for the family. Maybe the parents are out at work but they probably started the fire for the children before they left. The fire gives off warmth and shows that eventually they will get out of the cave and have a normal life again.

Source used:

http://ants-and-grasshoppers.blogspot.com/2011/06/great-recession-v-great-depression-diff.html

Visual Rhetoric of the Great Depression and the Great Recession

In this post I am going to compare and explore the differences in visual rhetoric from the Great Depression of the 1930’s to the visual rhetoric of the great recession of the 2000’s. It is often stated that a picture is worth a thousand words, so clearly photographs have a huge influence on us as people. They have the ability to make us feel a certain way and impact our choices. While photography has come a long way since the 30’s, it is still a creative form of expression that impacts how we think and feel about something.

Look at the above photograph; it is one of the most iconic pictures of the Great Depression. You probably have no idea how much of an impact this one photograph had. Let’s think of the original context of this picture, this captured life at one of the many FSA farms across the country. What you probably don’t realize is that the photographer was only one the farm because her family’s car broke down. You probably also didn’t know that this particular farm received 20,000 pounds of food from the federal government because of this picture. The headlines read that thousands were starving in these camps and the photo was there to cause an emotional response. This photo put a personal face with one of the hardest times in American history. This iconic photo is still used today and it defines an important period of our history.

The photographer appealed to pathos in this picture and it worked. She made the audience feel bad for the people at these farms and it resulted in help from the government. The photos used today to document the great recession are doing the same thing. They show people standing in long unemployment lines and pictures of children growing up in poverty. Photo editing software has also given people the ability to alter the original photos to make a greater appeal to you emotions. The technology has changed a great deal since the depression, but photographers are still appealing to your emotions and are able to impact your decisions with a single photograph. Next week I might explore more visual rhetoric focusing more on the great recession.

Sources used:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_Mother

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://0.tqn.com/d/history1900s/1/0/a/gd45.gif&imgrefurl=http://history1900s.about.com/od/photographs/tp/greatdepressionpictures.htm&h=600&w=462&sz=84&tbnid=hS0XmT_f8_5flM:&tbnh=84&tbnw=65&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dgreat%2Bdepression%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=great+depression&docid=rSFwaAIKCZDX0M&hl=en&sa=X&ei=C4R_Tq2cCOzfsQKdwNke&sqi=2&ved=0CF0Q9QEwBQ&dur=278

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.html

Where is Creativity Going in the Digital Age?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines creativity as “the ability to make new things or think of new ideas.” So in the age of computers what does it mean to be creative? Does making a YouTube video classify you as creative? Does using Photoshop or editing software to do something unique to a photo mean that you are creative? Where does blogging fall in the realm of creativity? These questions affect us all on a daily basis. It is easier for “Digital Natives” to be creative than any other generation before. The formality of being able to get your creative work to the masses has dissolved.

Take writing for example; being a writer in the nineteenth and twentieth century was hard work. An aspiring writer had to write their manuscript, most of the time by hand, and then take it to a publisher. The publisher then got to decide whether or not your work was worth being published. All of the books you see in bookstores still follow this convention, but eBooks are now an entirely different story. Barnes and Noble have come out with a free service called PubIt! This essentially eliminates the middleman. The idea is that you can log into this web portal and self publish your work and sell it in their eBook store. This is a prime example of how the digital world has lowered the barriers of creativity. You could also look at this with regards to the music industry and YouTube. So, are we more creative than the generations before us or are there simply less obstacles in our way?

Sources:

http://youthandmedia.org/wiki/Portal:Digital_Creativity

http://www.learnersdictionary.com/search/creativity

http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com/pubit_app/bn?t=support

Creativity, Piracy, and Intellectual Property

I have selected Creativity, Piracy, and Intellectual Property as my inquiry area. This topic stood out the most to me from the list. I think that the growth of the digital world has drastically changed the way people express themselves. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace have changed what it means to share and be creative. Piracy is also a growing problem in the music and movie industries. Computers have made it somewhat easy to share and copy files. Moral lines are blurred when it is so easy to attain illegal material.

I aim to explore all of these issues in depth this semester. I hope to explore how this is impacting the culture of “Digital Natives”. I also hope to look how it is affecting society as a whole and the global implications. How do people in other parts of the world look at the issues? Do “Digital Natives” ideas of what is right and moral differ from their parent’s views? Should blogging always be considered a form of creativity? I also wish to look at the impact that this inquiry area is having on education. I believe that this will be a relevant topic for a very long time as technology improves and ease of access increases.

Sources Used:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/youthandmedia/digitalnatives/areasofinquiry

http://www.borndigitalbook.com/