Alongside the accelerating pace of technological advancement, copyright law has constantly evolved, struggling to encompass every avenue of infringement. Global integration, itself provoking revolutionary innovations in data sharing, has time after time expanded beyond the foresight of legislative bodies who have attempted to match their laws to the current times. Ever since the first international effort was made to enforce copyright, at the 1883 Paris Convention, a multitude of international treaties have emerged and substantial political pressure exists globally for non-members to adopt the standards of the rest of the world. The most expansive piece of international legislation to date, TRIPS, and the upcoming Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement both work to reduce the globe’s most prevalent and financially draining form of piracy, software piracy. Many individuals fear that this new legislation will empower customs agents at borders to seize laptops and Mp3 players containing illegally obtained music, but the committee has recently stated that the laws will not take that form.
When Napster was under scrutiny by the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2001, it claimed that the files being shared between users were legally distributed under the ‘fair use’ doctrine of copyright law, which allows infringement for “literary criticism, social comment, news reporting, education, scholarship and research”. The court did not agree, considering the reproduction with Napster to be illegal and commercial . Napster was charged with both contributory infringement, by encouraging its clients to post and share, as well as vicarious infringement, due to its control over the networks and revenue through site visitation. Where Napster fell, however, countless file-sharing services have sprung up in its place and will continue to be a large monetary leak in the U.S. Intellectual Property market. In a decade when the U.S. is losing approximately 6.9 billion dollars a year due to piracy, it is frightening to consider that intellectual property accounts for well over 50% of American exports.
With Napster out of the picture, websites such as Megaupload, Rapidshare, Filestube and many others have emerged to allow instant file-to-file sharing. While millions of web users utilize these services daily through downloading, it is only the domain manager and users who upload content who are at legal risk. With such a disproportionately distributed risk, a powerful ‘black market’ emerges that is essentially risk-free for those who steal, as long as they don’t sell.
While intellectual property laws cannot keep pace with the development of new distribution systems, a common mantra has held strong since the old days of ftp server pirating:
“Distribution leaves tracks – If you only download you can relax”
Jared
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Online Behavioral Advertising: Cookies or Trojans?
The practice of Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) involves placing a cookie onto your computer that invisibly collects information on your internet usage and customization. Why is this called a 'cookie' and not a 'trojan'? According to PC Magazing Encyclopedia, a Trojan is:
"A program that appears legitimate, but performs some illicit activity when it is run. It may be used to locate password information or make the system more vulnerable to future entry. A Trojan is similar to a virus, except that it does not replicate itself."
A cookie, however, is:
"Used for authentication, storing site preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or anything else that can be accomplished through storing text data. They cannot replicate themselves and are not viruses"
It seems that the main difference between these two concepts is their degree of illicit activity. While trojans are usually malicious, cookies are simply 'investigative.' What can we do about this? How do we keep cookie's out of our computers entirely?
To put it simply, we can't.
Online information (web sites, videos, images) travel through the airwaves in streams of binary code. When they reach our computer, they enter through a variety of 'ports.' There are hundreds of ports built into the firmware of the computer and each is specialized to perform certain tasks at a certain rate. Often, malware will travel into your computer by exploiting ports that are not monitored actively by your computer. Cookies, however, enter through the normally open ports, disguised as elements of the website. While there are methods available to block some of them, there are numerous ways they can be incorporated within other site data in order to subvert software meant to prevent their entry.
Information is a two-way process, and websites will always have the ability to collect raw data on their visitors. The only question is, "how much is legal?" The FTC recently released a report citing how 'reasonable provision' would be made to protect consumer privacy but such general prose provides no direction or authority for regulatory bodies to step in. While there's no easy solution for the average internet user, the best advice I can give is to always stay informed.
Jared
URL for the Above Video
"A program that appears legitimate, but performs some illicit activity when it is run. It may be used to locate password information or make the system more vulnerable to future entry. A Trojan is similar to a virus, except that it does not replicate itself."
A cookie, however, is:
"Used for authentication, storing site preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or anything else that can be accomplished through storing text data. They cannot replicate themselves and are not viruses"
It seems that the main difference between these two concepts is their degree of illicit activity. While trojans are usually malicious, cookies are simply 'investigative.' What can we do about this? How do we keep cookie's out of our computers entirely?
To put it simply, we can't.
Online information (web sites, videos, images) travel through the airwaves in streams of binary code. When they reach our computer, they enter through a variety of 'ports.' There are hundreds of ports built into the firmware of the computer and each is specialized to perform certain tasks at a certain rate. Often, malware will travel into your computer by exploiting ports that are not monitored actively by your computer. Cookies, however, enter through the normally open ports, disguised as elements of the website. While there are methods available to block some of them, there are numerous ways they can be incorporated within other site data in order to subvert software meant to prevent their entry.
Information is a two-way process, and websites will always have the ability to collect raw data on their visitors. The only question is, "how much is legal?" The FTC recently released a report citing how 'reasonable provision' would be made to protect consumer privacy but such general prose provides no direction or authority for regulatory bodies to step in. While there's no easy solution for the average internet user, the best advice I can give is to always stay informed.
Jared
URL for the Above Video
Friday, December 3, 2010
Competitive Education & Bulk Pricing
While Just-In-Time inventory systems, such as Dell's web-based 'design your computer' service, provide the capability to design specific orders without risking excess inventory, there are only a fixed number of potential orders available and an accompanying distribution of consumer preference. Using this data, Dell can attempt to forecast future demand and purchase the appropriate amount of raw material, usually in bulk. Unfortunately, at this stage, the ability to minimize risks of excess inventory becomes far more difficult since forecasting works on probabilistic principles.
We can use this example to define an ideal just-in-time inventory system that can take advantage of bulk pricing whilst minimizing inventory in stock after purchase. It seems that to reduce holding costs entirely the organization would need to act as an intermediary with full knowledge of demand, thus providing the manufacturer with the specific details of the order and the destinations of its recipients. Thus, the role of the organization becomes one of demand centralization, compiling a list of all willing recipients of the product and ensuring their participation in the purchase of the product.
One particular organization, GroupOn, has done just this and can provide a number of local services and products at outrageous prices.
While this is an intriguing business model, I would like to see it extend into the realm of education. Certification examinations for a variety of positions and fields are outrageously expensive, since costs are usually cross-subsidized in case there is little turnout. One organization, certifying Nurses already does this. I would like to see this practice extend to educational programs that operate below capacity. This practice will bolster their attendance and hedge their operating risk, allowing them to remain competitive in the market.
Educational institutions motivated to remain competitive provide a far more enriching experience to the student - just ask the Ivy League.
Supporting an Educationally Competitive Future,
Jared Leichner
We can use this example to define an ideal just-in-time inventory system that can take advantage of bulk pricing whilst minimizing inventory in stock after purchase. It seems that to reduce holding costs entirely the organization would need to act as an intermediary with full knowledge of demand, thus providing the manufacturer with the specific details of the order and the destinations of its recipients. Thus, the role of the organization becomes one of demand centralization, compiling a list of all willing recipients of the product and ensuring their participation in the purchase of the product.
One particular organization, GroupOn, has done just this and can provide a number of local services and products at outrageous prices.
While this is an intriguing business model, I would like to see it extend into the realm of education. Certification examinations for a variety of positions and fields are outrageously expensive, since costs are usually cross-subsidized in case there is little turnout. One organization, certifying Nurses already does this. I would like to see this practice extend to educational programs that operate below capacity. This practice will bolster their attendance and hedge their operating risk, allowing them to remain competitive in the market.
Educational institutions motivated to remain competitive provide a far more enriching experience to the student - just ask the Ivy League.
Supporting an Educationally Competitive Future,
Jared Leichner
Friday, November 19, 2010
Preference Predictability: Psychology or Physiology?
What comes to mind when you hear the phrase neuro-marketing? I personally think of that scene from Minority Report where advertising screens choose what to display based on retinal scans of passing citizens:
I find this futuristic scenario to be a strange but realistic representation of the near future. All it requires is:
(1) A retinal database of the population
(2) Dynamic and long-distance retinal scanner devices
(3) A database of consumer preferences linked to each specific citizen
How will these three components be integrated into our society? A retinal database will become necessary once crime scene investigators gain handheld retinal scan devices (due to the inevitable reduction of the price of the technology). This technique may provide alternative clues to an identity when fingerprint or dental records are insufficient. This program will most likely be worked into the early education system, ensuring that a large proportion of future citizens will already be stored in the database. As the technology improves and retinal scanners find more and more applications, they will most likely gain the ability to track faces and read eyes from a distance. There is current debate over the health impacts of biometric retinal scanners as they invasively fire infrared light directly into the eye. I believe that by the time the technology becomes more commercial these negative impacts will be reduced by using a different wavelength of light to scan. Of these three requirements, however, it is the consumer preference database that will be completed first, and it will be completed soon.
An online tracking company, known as RapLeaf, has been compiling large databases of consumer preferences, linking together a person’s name, e-mail, phone number, address, political affiliation, religious affiliation, hobbies, political/environmental causes and a host of other details. With a ’web spider’ that crawls the web collects information by browsing public face book profiles and searching for key words and phrases to determine a host of personal details, online tracking companies are quickly building up volumes of information on individual consumers and often distribute this data to other organizations to help them analyze consumer preferences. How much privacy does this violate? RapLeaf states that individuals can remove themselves from Rap Leaf’s ’services’ on their website, but what right did the organization have to automatically ‘serve’ us?
Let’s discuss what neuro-marketing means today. Neuro-marketing refers to the practice of measuring a diverse array of physiological variables (heart rate, skin conductivity, brain activity and pupil dilation) while consumers view various advertisements. Researchers then compare patterns in their reactions to motifs of behavior established in previous studies. Recently, Campbell’s soup employed neuro-marketing in its redesign of its soup cans and made the following changes:
While marketing through physiological and retinal analyses are vastly different, they inadvertently go hand in hand. Attempts to quantify how ’ideal advertising’ differs according to age, gender and culture are necessary precursors to dynamic advertising arrangements, where advertising targets not only geographic areas but individual people. As target markets for advertising narrow in scope as smaller and smaller groups are targeted simultaneously, don’t be surprised when you get an eerie feeling that you are losing some control over the brevity of choices available to you.
Breathe Deep, Seek Peace,
Jared Leichner
Sources:
RapLeaf Profiles Users by Name
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304410504575560243259416072.html>
The Emotional Quotient of Soup Shopping <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704804204575069562743700340.html>
I find this futuristic scenario to be a strange but realistic representation of the near future. All it requires is:
(1) A retinal database of the population
(2) Dynamic and long-distance retinal scanner devices
(3) A database of consumer preferences linked to each specific citizen
How will these three components be integrated into our society? A retinal database will become necessary once crime scene investigators gain handheld retinal scan devices (due to the inevitable reduction of the price of the technology). This technique may provide alternative clues to an identity when fingerprint or dental records are insufficient. This program will most likely be worked into the early education system, ensuring that a large proportion of future citizens will already be stored in the database. As the technology improves and retinal scanners find more and more applications, they will most likely gain the ability to track faces and read eyes from a distance. There is current debate over the health impacts of biometric retinal scanners as they invasively fire infrared light directly into the eye. I believe that by the time the technology becomes more commercial these negative impacts will be reduced by using a different wavelength of light to scan. Of these three requirements, however, it is the consumer preference database that will be completed first, and it will be completed soon.
An online tracking company, known as RapLeaf, has been compiling large databases of consumer preferences, linking together a person’s name, e-mail, phone number, address, political affiliation, religious affiliation, hobbies, political/environmental causes and a host of other details. With a ’web spider’ that crawls the web collects information by browsing public face book profiles and searching for key words and phrases to determine a host of personal details, online tracking companies are quickly building up volumes of information on individual consumers and often distribute this data to other organizations to help them analyze consumer preferences. How much privacy does this violate? RapLeaf states that individuals can remove themselves from Rap Leaf’s ’services’ on their website, but what right did the organization have to automatically ‘serve’ us?
Let’s discuss what neuro-marketing means today. Neuro-marketing refers to the practice of measuring a diverse array of physiological variables (heart rate, skin conductivity, brain activity and pupil dilation) while consumers view various advertisements. Researchers then compare patterns in their reactions to motifs of behavior established in previous studies. Recently, Campbell’s soup employed neuro-marketing in its redesign of its soup cans and made the following changes:
While marketing through physiological and retinal analyses are vastly different, they inadvertently go hand in hand. Attempts to quantify how ’ideal advertising’ differs according to age, gender and culture are necessary precursors to dynamic advertising arrangements, where advertising targets not only geographic areas but individual people. As target markets for advertising narrow in scope as smaller and smaller groups are targeted simultaneously, don’t be surprised when you get an eerie feeling that you are losing some control over the brevity of choices available to you.
Breathe Deep, Seek Peace,
Jared Leichner
Sources:
RapLeaf Profiles Users by Name
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304410504575560243259416072.html>
The Emotional Quotient of Soup Shopping <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704804204575069562743700340.html>
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