// M36: Assignment II – Essay Plan

For M36: Information Societies, I have chosen to write my 2000 word essay on the meaning of “ownership” in today’s technological environment in-which property is infinitely reproducible, highly malleable and surrounded by a culture lacking in coercive power relationships and material scarcity economics, based upon the following essay question (Source):

“What does “ownership” mean when property is infinitely reproducible, highly malleable and the surrounding culture has neither coercive power relationships nor material scarcity economics?”

(Raymond 2000  Homesteading the Noosphere : Part 4. Link)

Essay Plan

• Introduce today’s technological environment, the internet and various things that use it (ie www, torrents, p2p)
• Reference Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte
• Torrents, The Pirate Bays Story and the “pirate philosophy” of “ownership”
• The argument behind DRM
• iTunes and Amazons Kindle, x-box and wii game downloads also other game download processes via pc (valve’s steam for playing half-life)
• limits of DRM, the pirates dream and the compromise
• Copyright laws and public domain
• Digital Rights and file sharing
• Explanation of material scarcity economics and power relationships

Introduction

Since its creation the internet has grown exponentially, transversed the globe and is now creating terabytes of data every day; several well known protocols use the internet to transmit information, the most well known is the Hypertext Markup Language transmitted over port 80 and otherwise known in its entirety as the “World Wide Web” (www).  By design the www replicates information, a server connected to the internet stores a particular piece of information otherwise known as hosted data (the nuts and bolts of a web site.) When a visitor loads a web page into their browser the data on the server isn’t instantly moved to their computer, a copy is instead transmitted and subsequently stored and reproduced on the visitors computer; under normal circumstances when the visitor browses to another web page the cached data from the previous page is erased however residues do remain in both the random access memory and hard disk storage until they are over-written by fresh data. This poses the question of ownership, who owns the data stored in a computers random access memory, does ownership rights change as that data is copied and written to the computers hard disk and are these rights breached if the computer user backs up their hard disk through copying its content to another hard disk?

Data Transport and the Internet

Explain here the TCP/IP protocol and how its design means the internet continues to reproduce information, introduce HTTP, .torrent and p2p technologies. Begin to question the meaning of “ownership” in relation to bits of data. Introduce the concept of data not only stored on servers and computers as a whole but how copies are stored on various system hardware such as random access memory, hard disk and in transit on the network. How caching works, and how data is reproduced if only for a ms on each jump it makes through nodes on the internet from source to destination and how snooping may play into this.

(fig 1) Simple Server to End User Diagram

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(fig 2) Complex End User Diagram

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Copyright, Ownership and DRM

Here, build upon the legalities of copyright law and where it leaves the enduser in respects to ownership over data. Introduce how DRM technologies are incorporated into this and discuss how the intrinsic workings of the internet complecate things. Question if DRM is useful, and how copyright law could hurt the end user. Include the psycholgical effect of purchasing and ownership of physical things and how with DRM the definition of what has been purchased changes for the seller while remaining the same for the buyer.

Bibliography

Note: icons for fig1 and fig2 came from iconarchive and have been released for non-comercial use, the diagrams where created by myself for use within this essay.

Who owns the copyright on a blank cd?