DIGITAL MEDIA

Property Rights Issues in Digital Media

Property Rights Issues in Digital Media

Introdcution

Digital media has changed dramatically since the development of the Internet and improvement of wireless technology. John Palfrey, Professor of Law and Urs Gasser, Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, both employed by the prestigious Harvard Law School, have written about how the world has been reshaped because of this new digital world in Born Digital. They found that this period “is the most rapid period of technological transformation ever, at least, when it comes to information”. This transformation of digital media over the last twenty-five years and the introduction of tools like the iPad create a clutter of information that threaten the ability to think deeply and concentrate, which has made the current educational system obsolete and ineffective. This same technology can be utilized to create the school of the future, by improving learning in the Digital Age (Berkman, & Shumway, 2003).

Discussion

The internet provides many different types of electronic media content, and it can be very hard for content creators to protect their work. Technologies like the Digital Rights Management work hard to hinder illegal use of copyrighted material. Digital Rights Management is a coding technology that is used to control digital content. It lets copyright owners to regulate their creations when that content is delivered to the consumer in a digital format, a way to control distribution and usage of copyright protected content that has been made available in a digital format. DRM does this by providing licensed access to online materials, which enables the content provider to keep control over what the user can do with the products they bought (Berkman, & Shumway, 2003). These license agreements are simply contracts between the vendor and consumer which provide a secure environment for the vendor and consumer to exchange digital resources.

A big issue in our society that questions moral standards is the topic of property rights, as it relates to music downloads via the internet. These issues used to be no concern to major record labels that produce and distribute musical compositions. Originally, there was not a convenient or cost effective way for the consumer to make copies of vinyl records. Digital technology has advanced to the point that music duplication has negatively affected the long term profitability of these corporations. The distribution, or sharing, of music is completely digital via the internet, which has made it easier for record companies to gather information on the illegal downloading and distributions.

To protect commercial digital intellectual property and avoid digital piracy, we need a system that prevents unauthorized access to digital content and manages content usage rights (Liu and Safavi-Naini and Sheppard 2003). Music piracy exploded in the late 1990's and caused groups like the Recording Industry Association of America to crack down on companies such as Napster that provided that provided free music downloads. The number of lawsuits against individuals who illegally download music has escalated to the point that people are now ...