The Double Punch of Law and Technology: Fighting Music Piracy or Remaking Copyright in a Digital Age?

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bach

The battle between the recording industry and those illegal sharing music over the Internet has gripped headlines over the last few years like few others related to the digital age. At its core, it is a battle about the meaning of property and thus a battle over the heart of the emerging information economy. This article critically examines the double punch of law and technology – the simultaneous and interwoven deployment of legal and electronic measures to protect digital content – and asks whether it is merely a defense strategy against piracy, as the industry asserts, or rather an attempt to fundamentally redefine the producer-consumer relationship. Based on some initial evidence for the latter proposition, the article analyzes reasons for concern, outlines the current politics of copyright policymaking that have given producers the upper hand, and sketches elements of a strategy to fight music piracy that does not infringe on basic consumer rights.

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 94-112
Author(s):  
Angelė Pečeliūnaitė

The article analyses the possibility of how Cloud Computing can be used by libraries to organise activities online. In order to achieve a uniform understanding of the essence of technology SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS, the article discusses the Cloud Computing services, which can be used for the relocation of libraries to the Internet. The improvement of the general activity of libraries in the digital age, the analysis of the international experience in the libraries are examples. Also the article discusses the results of a survey of the Lithuanian scientific community that confirms that 90% of the scientific community is in the interest of getting full access to e-publications online. It is concluded that the decrease in funding for libraries, Cloud Computing can be an economically beneficial step, expanding the library services and improving their quality.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110186
Author(s):  
Gianfranco Polizzi

This article proposes a theoretical framework for how critical digital literacy, conceptualized as incorporating Internet users’ utopian/dystopian imaginaries of society in the digital age, facilitates civic engagement. To do so, after reviewing media literacy research, it draws on utopian studies and political theory to frame utopian thinking as relying dialectically on utopianism and dystopianism. Conceptualizing critical digital literacy as incorporating utopianism/dystopianism prescribes that constructing and deploying an understanding of the Internet’s civic potentials and limitations is crucial to pursuing civic opportunities. The framework proposed, which has implications for media literacy research and practice, allows us to (1) disentangle users’ imaginaries of civic life from their imaginaries of the Internet, (2) resist the collapse of critical digital literacy into civic engagement that is understood as inherently progressive, and (3) problematize polarizing conclusions about users’ interpretations of the Internet as either crucial or detrimental to their online engagement.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 354-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Herrera
Keyword(s):  

The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia … The Internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The Internet is a threat to human civilization.


2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia Rose Marcus ◽  
Merrill Singer

In this article, the authors provide a layered analysis of Ebola-chan, a visual cultural artifact of the 2014–2015 Ebola outbreak. Rather than considering her as a two-dimensional anime character (i.e. as a simple iconic coping mechanism and/or a fear response), this recent Internet meme is analyzed using an integrated semiotic and structural approach that involves discussion of the genesis of disaster humor in light of the changing world of the Internet, the history of anthropomorphism of disease, and the biosocial nature of an infectious disease epidemic. Our analysis is designed to advance both the anthropology of the Internet and the anthropology of infectious disease. As a multi-vocal symbol with different meanings for different audiences, Ebola-chan represents a social response to a lethal epidemic in the digital age.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Judith Hildebrandt ◽  
Jack Barentsen ◽  
Jos de Kock

Abstract History shows that the use of the Bible by Christians has changed over the centuries. With the digitization and the ubiquitous accessibility of the Internet, the handling of texts and reading itself has changed. Research has also shown that young people’s faith adapts to the characteristics of the ‘age of authenticity’, which changes the role of normative institutions and texts in general. With regard to these developments this article deals with the question: How relevant is personal Bible reading for the faith formation of highly religious Protestant German teenagers? Answers to this question are provided from previous empirical surveys and from two qualitative studies among highly religious teenagers in Germany. The findings indicate, that other spiritual practices for young people today are more important as a source of faith than reading the Bible. The teenagers interviewed tend to seek an individual affective experience when reading the Bible, so that the importance of cognitive grasp of the content takes a back seat to personal experience.


2015 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather B. Terrell

<p><em>In a literature survey on how reference collections have changed to accommodate patrons’ web-based information-seeking behaviors, one notes a marked “us vs. them” mentality — a fear that the Internet might render reference irrelevant. These anxieties are oft-noted in articles urging libraries to embrace digital and online reference sources. Why all the ambivalence? Citing existing research and literature, this essay explores myths about the supposed superiority of physical reference collections and how patrons actually use them, potential challenges associated with electronic reference collections and how providing vital e-reference collections benefits the library as well as its patrons.</em></p>


Author(s):  
Konstantin S. Sharov

The paper is concerned with a study of the changing content and style of non-canonical Christian religious preaching in the digital age. Special attention is paid to the analysis of modern rhetoric Christian preachers practice in their Internet channels, forums and blogs. It is shown that the content of the Internet sermon is largely determined by the Internet users themselves and the topics of their appeals. The fundamental characteristics of the content of the Internet sermon are: 1) focus on the individual, their private goals and objectives, not just on theological problems; 2) rethinking the phenomenon of the neighbour; 3) a shift from the Hesychast tradition of preaching the importance of inner spiritual concentration to the preaching of religious interactivity. The observed stylistic features of the digital preaching can be summarised as follows: 1) moving away from simple answers to the rhetoric of new questions addressed to the audience; 2) empathy, co-participation with a person in his/her life conflicts and experiences; 3) desire to share religious information, not to impose it; 4) resorting to various rhetorical techniques to reach different audiences; 5) a tendency to use slang, sometimes even irrespective of the audience’s language preferences and expectations. It should be pointed out that the Orthodox Internet sermon in the Russian Internet space has a dual and contradictory nature. On the one hand, this phenomenon can be regarded as positive for the Orthodox preaching in general, since it is a means of spreading Christian ideas in the social groups that do not constitute a core of parishioners of Orthodox churches, for example, schoolchildren, students, representatives of technical professions, etc. On the other hand, the effectiveness of such preaching is still unclear. Lack of reliable statistics as well as the results of the survey related to the Orthodox Internet preaching gives us no opportunity to judge about effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the phenomenon at this stage of its development.


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-47
Author(s):  
Marzenna Nowicka

Scholaris is a portal of MEN agenda with educational electronic resources designated for teachers of all stages of education. The aim of the research was to identify the promoted model of digital early childhood education. An analysis of the content of portal showed a focus on technology being used to illustrate the content covered by the teaching program, limitation of openness to other communities and places on the internet, negligence of the communication between education entities and the hegemony of digital content for the teacher to reproduce. The digitality on the portal is seen as a visualsound enhancement of classes and the technical facilitation of the teacher’s work. In spite of the current innovative trends, the general model promoted on the website is seen as functional-behavioral.


Author(s):  
Олег Евсютин ◽  
Oleg Evsutin ◽  
Анна Мельман ◽  
Anna Melman ◽  
Роман Мещеряков ◽  
...  

One of the areas of digital image processing is the steganographic embedding of additional information into them. Digital steganography methods are used to ensure the information confidentiality, as well as to track the distribution of digital content on the Internet. Main indicators of the steganographic embedding effectiveness are invisibility to the human eye, characterized by the PSNR metric, and embedding capacity. However, even with full visual stealth of embedding, its presence may produce a distortion of the digital image natural model in the frequency domain. The article presents a new approach to reducing the distortion of the digital image natural model in the field of discrete cosine transform (DCT) when embedding information using the classical QIM method. The results of the experiments show that the proposed approach allows reducing the distortion of the histograms of the distribution of DCT coefficients, and thereby eliminating the unmasking signs of embedding.


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