Group Presentation # 1

One of the Group's in our class presented on a book called "Steal This File Sharing Book: What They Won't Tell You About File Sharing."

Ok, I had to laugh at the title. I mean it was a user's guide on how to download music, files, movies, etc. from the Internet. What was interesting was how the people responsible for policing the Internet and this type of downloading are starting to come around. They are figuring out that "Hey we can't stop this, so how do we get around it?"

I was reading recently about how DRM encryption is starting to go away as producers of digital media are trying to figure out and implement SaaS with subscriptions ("welcome to the cloud!") rather than file by file purchases.

The funny thing is last night I saw a preview for a new movie coming out on Blu-Ray and it included a Disney movie file you could transfer to your computer, phone, media device, etc. to watch the movie. They already figured someone would rip it, so canned the cost of trying to implement DRM software and just said "Here take it, matter of fact we'll make it easier."

But the presentation was a nice flow of historical progression, from Napster to Kazaa to all the other filesharing sites, of how the online community responded/is responding to the changes in DRM and how "they" (the online community) can pass around the information. Furthermore, they presented on the wide variety of available download sites out there as well as differentiating between them (newsgroups/ftps/SuperNodes/etc).