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Category Archives: Intellectual Property
Is there a way we can protect companies’ copyright interests while not harming consumers? It has been difficult to achieve one aim without harming the other. The Megaupload case demonstrates the tension between the two sides, as the FBI may now face a lawsuit from Megaupload users over its shutdown of the popular website last month. The FBI targeted Megaupload for its millions in revenue that it brought it from offering copyrighted works free on the internet. However, there were also many legitimate uses of Megaupload’s services, and all those who had important files on Megaupload’s servers have no access to their data. The government and entertainment conglomerates have been battling with technology for several decades now – the debates we now see have their roots in the 1984 case that pitted Sony’s VCR technology against University City Studios. Yet here we are, some 28 years later, still wondering whether…
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The sales numbers for this past holiday season recently came out, and it was not a good one of the video game industry. Compared to the 2010 holiday season, 2011’s sales were 21 percent lower. Despite holiday releases of blockbusters like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Just Dance 3, even software sales were down 14 percent from 2010, dropping to $2.04 billion. Are we ready for new systems? Outdated systems are what some are claiming as the reason for the drop in sales. It may hard to believe, but the Xbox360 has already been out nearly seven years now. The PlayStation3 and Nintendo Wii are over five years old. Last summer, Nintendo announced that its next generation console, the Wii U, would be coming out sometime in 2012. A trend we will probably see with forthcoming video game consoles is their having more integrated features. The consoles already…
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One consumer market set to grow exponentially in the coming years is the e-book industry. E-books have already grown from devices that let people haul around hundreds of books on a lightweight tablet to a way for students to cut costs, for authors to publish books cheaply, and for the environmentally conscious to reduce their impact on the environment. Proof of the increasing popularity of e-books, Apple’s recently launched iBookstore sold 350,000 digital textbooks (or eTextbooks, as some call them) during its first three days of operation. Depending on whom you talk to, e-books have both advantages and drawbacks. We already mentioned several of their advantages. Some of the drawbacks and concerns of moving to an increasingly digital way of reading include the following: Decreased sales for companies in between writers and their readers; there is less of a need for all of the middlemen like distributors, publishers, and marketers…
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