The Case for Copyright Reform (week 5)

    Throughout the text, the main point frequently repeated is the idea of changing the copyright legislation. The main reason behind such a suggestion is today's copyright policies that are considered imbalanced. 

   Undeniably, it is impossible to inspect people's private messages in order the check copyright violation acts. This is directly related to privacy which is a fundamental human right and cannot be infringed. So that new legislation in the means of resolving copyright issues from both the author and the user sides is needed.

   The proposal by Pirate Party to reformat the copyright legislation has some main points to highlight. Firstly, there shouldn't be any change to recognize the authors as they are. No one else can claim that he/she is that author. This is of course one of the primary matters to take into account in such a proposal. Another one is non-profit file sharing. This literally means that if people want to take a copy of any file they should be able to do. As long as there is not any financial target, it is alright. 

   Alongside the above-mentioned matters, free sampling is also underlined in the proposal. Quite restrictive copyrights for artists, especially for musicians makes it harder to reuse a piece of a work that has been used by another artist before. So that new legislation but of course with some less restrictive matters is needed. 

   DRM - Digital Rights Management is another point here to study carefully. It simply means the technologies that are in use to limit people's capacities to copy work. Considering the fact that copying is restricted in DRMs as it is in Free Samples, DRMs also need to be reset and have less limited rules.

   So, considering all the above, it can be said that new legislation for resetting copyrights should be approved and make sure that it is much more useful not on paper but in practice.

Review of the Information Society Report (week 4)

    To be able to talk about the Information Society, the term itself should be defined. As it's clearly described in the report that the Information Society means a creative society based on interaction. The methods of doing some new things, not new technologies are considered to be the most important concept for an Information Society.

   It is time to take a quick look at some global trends that are the logical consequences of the development of Information Society. Firstly, as time goes by the tax rates go down and states invest more in skilled employees. This is a kind of competition between the states and they do it mainly for attracting well-versed specialists. Population aging can also be considered as one of the main trends in an Information Society. It literally means a kind of divergence of the older generation from the youngers who are still eligible to work. As anticipated, this trend has already started in many Europan countries since 2010. Another forecast was about rapid development in bio-industries. Genetic Engineering, Medicine, and also Biotechnology were foreseen to progress a lot. Despite they are developing fields of today, the predicted rise has not been seen yet. 

   Let's examine the development of the Information Society from a geographical perspective. Some regions like North America (more precisely, the US), the EU, and Asia are the leading zones on the way to be the most developed Information Societies. US's and Asia's positions are more advantageous than the EU's. As the US forms 1/3 of the world economy and its military expenses equal nearly 50% of the world's total military expenses, it is considered one of the leading powers. What makes Asia unique in this field is the annual development rate which is roughly estimated as 10%. The fact is that the global production and markets are shifting to Asia (especially eastern Asia - China). Moreover, the annual number of specialists trained in China in the fields of science and technology which is 590 000 and more than the EU (440 000) and the US (385 000) is another reason for such a noticeable development of Asia.                                                     

   Apart from the predictions and most-developed regions, there are also some models applied by the aforementioned societies; Silicon Valley (by the USA), Singapore (by Asia), and the Finnish model         (by EU). Briefly talking, the Finnish model applied by the EU countries has some values to focus on like Freedom, Encouragement, Creativity, and Balance. By concentrating on the mentioned values, people protect the industrial era structures of the welfare state. Moreover, there are also some necessary concepts that an information society should base on. Creative economy, creative welfare society are prime examples of these concepts. The mentioned notions are to be the main structural points for the social development of an Information Society. 

New Media Component - Skype! (week 3)

    Undoubtedly, our lives began changing since contemporary media tools influenced the world. Real-time chat tools are one of the important portions of such tools to draw attention. A prime example of the aforementioned technologies would be Skype.

  

 Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zenström, Janus Friis and four Estonian developers. Skype was a revolutionary technology that enabled instant telecommunication between 2 or a group of people. Before Skype was invented, video calls were not publicly achieved yet, and the only mean of instant communication over distance was possible through cell phones. Indeed, there were a number of attempts until Skype, but it was the first application that publicized videotelephony. In the view of Covid-19, let's just imagine that such a pandemic would have begun before the invention of Skype (videoconferencing). Since all should stay home and video calls have not been achieved yet, distance education, online business meetings, and many more would be impossible. Moreover, videoconferencing also increases efficiency, money, and attendance, and saves time.

   So, thanks to the creation of Skype, video calls became a handy factor in the rapidly growing world. 

REFERENCE:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business-insights-ideas/resources/10-reasons-to-use-video-conferencing

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/skype-history_b_1283414

https://www.xda-developers.com/files/2015/02/skype-logo-open-graph-810x298_c.png [Source of the image]

Two Early Internet Technologies (Week 2)

    Unarguably, the internet and its technologies have evolved in a quite brief period of time. Throughout the development process, some of the initial technologies have retired and been replaced with some contemporary technologies, and some still survive. Time to take a quick look at the above mentioned technologies.

   The prime example to be highlighted for the replaced internet technologies would be the dial-up modems. We know that a modem is used to send and receive data between the connected computers. The dial-up modems operated the same function in the early eras of the internet. AT&T produced the first commercial modem called "Bell 103" in 1962 and interestingly it had a full-duplex connection. The speed of the next generations of modems soared to 14.4 kbps in 1991, and 56kbps in 1996 which were were very high compared to Bell 103 having only 300 bps. Next, the dial-up modems have been replaced with broadband internet access.

 

   While talking about the internet, it is good to highlight that the internet is the interconnected network of computers. Since the ethernet is a kind of connection between computers like the internet, ethernet can also be considered as a prior internet technology that still emerges. It started being developed in the Research Center Palo Alto of the Xerox's Corporation in 1973 by Robert Metcalfe and his team. R. Metcalfe could commercialize it in 1973. Thanks to the creation of the internet, ethernet became more useful. Unlike most of the network (internet) technologies, ethernet survived and is still in use. Today, the ethernet speed ranges between 10 and 400 Mbps and is preferred as the most common LAN (Local Area Network) technology.

REFERENCE:

https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/d_u_m_h

https://www.pocket-lint.com/gadgets/news/141336-33-obsolete-technologies-that-will-baffle-modern-generations [Source of image 1]

https://www.britannica.com/technology/Ethernet

https://realpars.com/ethernet/  [Source of image 2]