Copyright, Infringement and Stupidity

To start off in my routine sort of way: while sitting in an Airbus A319 on the way to Vienna (yes folks, it's another airplane post, typed on my iPhone and not an Android), I had remembered I had to start my ICT assignment. I have already finished the first part of it, as you can see in the previous post, but this next part is extremely time consuming and you will probably not see anything else on this blog but posts on copyright over these next 3 weeks. I would have liked to post about something else alongside copyright, but with 2 1200 word essays to type up, my fingers would never cope! I will however guarantee you that the next series of posts will be highly interesting, useful and educational. So let's get started.

There are several ways to protect your ideas nowadays: Copyright, that ® logo (no idea what it means), trademark and patents. These each protect different things (copyright is protecting media and text, patents protect ideas and products and a trademark protects a logo, I think). You might want to look up the proper definition! So, what is their significance? If you make a song, you do not want people going around and claiming the song is theirs, right? If you have an idea that will change the industry, you will defiantly not want a rival copying it. This is what these laws aim to do.

Remixes, Mashups and More

As part of one of my school ICT assignments, I need to post some of my favourite machups/remixes on my blog. Just to note, a remix is taking someone else's work or content and re-makeing it into something original, as Larry Lessig says in this TED talk below (skip to 8:30 to see the interesting stuff):

Think Different

The “think different” ad campaign was one of Apple’s most influential advertisements ever. It was created in 1997 (my birthday!) and restored Apple to its once famous image. The ad came in many formats: a famous television commercial (which I will show you later), several print advertisements and a number of TV promos for Apple products.

Apple was loosing a good reputation as a company before the ad launched due to Steve Jobs, The founder of Apple Computer.inc, being fired from his own company! The company went readily downhill. A lot of the Apple supporters left to competitors for better equipment and processors (Apple was using PowerPC, whereas Intel was the up and coming standard). Even worse, the million-dollar project, The Apple Newton, a PDA type device, was largely unsuccessful, loosing Apple Millions. The advertisement, in many ways, marked a significant turning point in Apple’s history, as the re-emergence as one of the major tech giants. Along with the ad, the return of Steve Jobs and a whole bunch of new revolutionary products (including the iMac, Mac OS X and the PowerBooks), really pushed Apple back into the competitive game of tech.

3 More Thoughts

While I am sitting on a Boeing 737 (which my uncle flies) with a screaming baby behind me and a class of loud teenage school girls on a trip to London, who think they need to cheer at everything, in front of me, I decided to continue working on my posts regarding issues that are very important to me. 

Lets start with Sony's action against the people who hacked their PS3 system. The hackers got into the system and retrieved the master code. This code is used to verify that the games inserted into the console are legitimate. If one put a homemade game into the console, without it being signed with this code, it will not load. Now you can sign these homemade and pirated games with the master key, which is meant to be top secret. 

Earth, Nature and Mankind

While on my flight from London to Vienna to visit my grandparents over half term, and while listening to "9000 days" from the Invictus soundtrack, I was looking out the window at the clouds. Being my UNSUAL self, I was deep in thought, which, as previously stated, is very unusual for me.

Anyway, while I was thinking and looking over the clouds and the cities below, I had a moment of realisation, kind of anyway. Please note, this is not something I will usually write about and it pains me to use clichés, but this seemed important to me and probably to every living organism on this planet. Again, if you do not like clichés, please stop reading and go away, as you will think I am completely mad for posting something like this on a technology orientated blog.

WikiLeaks

We have all heard about them, we all know what they do and we all know what the problem is. But, if you take away all the media speculation and government pressure, what is the real story?

WikiLeaks is a non-profit organization who describe themselves as “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking”. This basically means that they release secret documents for the world to see. They release documents from corporate company information to classified war and government documents. Usually these go into tremendous detail as well.

Near Field Communication (NFC)

This technology allows mobile devices to exchange data between itself and other devices. This will evolve, in my opinion, to our smart-phones (or brand new super-phones, to be mentioned in another post) to act as our wallets. We could use this technology to pay at restaurants, trains, online goods and even replace our travel cards. This idea could also evolve to become a ticket system, where you buy a plane or theatre ticket and use our mobiles to check in or gain access.

This technology requires a special chip inside a device. Most new Android phones and a new iPhone will have this functionality built into them. I think this is the way forward, especially with the junk nowadays in our pockets, and will eventually be accepted as payment everywhere. Barclays Bank and Visa are already there, so get with it!

How game orientated has the world become?

To answer this question, very. We are now approaching CES, where all the new gadget trends for 2011 will be shown. 3D gaming, tablet computers and many other things. There will be many more devices for playing games on, such as Nintendo's 3DS, and many more games to go with them. However, there is one game, with such a simple concept, that was only designed for iOS, which hit it BIG. I am obviously talking about Angry Birds.

It has now managed to get itself onto the PS3 and PSP gaming devices, with all 63 levels; however, rarely do games like Angry Birds make it all the way to the merchandising stage. On one of my recent visits to the Apple Store, I noticed these:

Not only that, Angry Birds have also got stuffed animals and kitchen utensils!