Tag Archives: internet

Online pirate websites in the courts again

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It seems like every time I sit down to do these posts, another one of those pirate websites (Megaupload, The Pirate Bay, etc.) is losing a court case. This time, the unlucky party is BitTorrent. Recently, this website and its associates lost a major ruling against Disney, Fox, Paramount, and a slew of other major producers. The ruling was that BitTorrent was allowing for people to illegally download and distribute films and television shows. The ruling was unanimous, and charges will be named soon. It seems as if a new change is coming for the internet. These websites, which once were major powers on the internet, are now being slowly taken apart. It will be interesting to see how this long developments unfolds, and if the legal system is able to truly eliminate these entities.

http://www.deadline.com/2013/03/hollywood-studios-score-appeals-court-win-in-copyright-case/

Recent Developments – Germany

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In the past few days, a major development occurred in Germany that will have a profound effect on copyright laws over the internet going forward. Originally, the German parliament was sponsoring a bill that would have negative effects on internet search engines, particularly Google, who has links to various news sources scattered across websites all over the internet. The legislation would allow for newspapers and other news sources require search engines to stop showing these links unless the company agreed to pay licensing fees to the new source. However, heavy lobbying by Google has resulted in the bill being severely watered down. Now, the bill states that while news sources can now require charging search engines for the printing of full texts, the search engines still have free reign in using small snippets of text in advertising links. The bill has passed in the lower house of the German parliament and is awaiting a vote in the upper house. Google is calling this a victory for the free internet movement, but what effect this development actually ends up producing remains to be seen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/02/technology/german-copyright-law-targets-google-links.html

Advertising Books

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It’s weird to see the need to advertise for books, but why is that? when was the last time you saw an ad on the Tv or whatever, for a printed book?

The library got me thinking with their valentines themed push to get people to pleasure read. It’s not that people don’t pleasure read anymore but the use of physical books has declined. It makes sense though, why carry around a big clunky book when a Kindle holds 500 books. With the digitization of print media we lose something culturally, because of the vast amount of text available at a moment to us on the internet we have become addicted to instant literary gratification.

Everyday before I go to classes I read a certain humor website that in many ways is like a magazine; they publish new articles almost everyday and hey they make me laugh. But whatever happened to actually subscribing to a magazine, well it doesn’t work out anymore. Personally I want a new article everyday ready and waiting online when I get up I don’t have the time to wait around for a weekly or monthly magazine subscription.

So for the sake of printed books, go read something that has turnable pages, instead of on a screen.