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Campaign Intro page.

This is my example however the original design was found from (CHIN2OFF - Deviant Art) and interpreted for my project. It was exactly what I was looking for, so it makes sense to recycle it to suit my needs. I give the guy credit! Took ages to make! - will be better with the interactivity and kinetic movement though.

The intro page will use the above question mark, which is built up of facts and consequences of downloading. After greater research into the area, I found that interactive text has more of an effect on the users Long Term Memory, meaning next time they go to download, perhaps this will trigger a memory of the website. The question mark is only in JPEG format at this time, but I am currently in the process of exporting into After Effects to begin the kinetic stage of development. I hope to have this completed by the end of this week, and then a final layout page.

Next week I'm off to take photographs for the Homepage background. The homepage will be built up of tiny images of teenagers holding up their favourite song, film or Television title, as though a photograph for a criminal. I feel this will get across the importance of the matter to my desired market. If you'd like to see a site which uses a similar (not exact) idea see here: but ignore the sexy old man! http://www.workingelement.com/#/site/our-work/still

PRP. were I'm at.

Looking forward to this weeks PRP sessions, just to nail down what I'm actually going to do about wording the project I have in mind. He's an overview of my plans so far.

I'd like to consider the ways in which interactivity has improved (if it has) in schools and how students find working with interactive educational products in their academic studies. What subjects is it used in? What does the government put in for funding interactive products in schools? what products are used? How are they used? are there stronger products developed for specific subjects and is this having an effect on that subjects results?

I'd like to know where these developers are and whether they use online services or software type products in their work.

Possible title for PRP:

Can interactive products aid the education of primary school students?

I'd like to create and test artefacts within a school environment, both my own and others product development.

The site - what it needs and what to think about.

Content:

The Copyright Protection Society is starting a public information campaign that illustrates and explains what file sharing is, when and why it is illegal and also the consequences of being involved with this illegal activity. - need to ensure this is ALL included in content. Perhaps a page per item? Aimed at public, so needs to have a clear and understandable set of info for all.

Produce a micro-website that consists of five distinct pages and includes wellformed accessible WC3 validating css/xhtml and includes at least one interactive
element. - interactive element, could be really clever here and create something which really involves and attracts the user. I've already considered some kinetic typography for the first page to capture the viewer, because admitedly, its not something which enthrals a viewer reading stacks of text.

My new Favourite site:

http://www.incredibox.fr/

For the site, I would like to use a character (or two) to represent the average downloader. This may invoke a more positive response to the awareness, and make the site more fun for a range of ages.

Broadband to blame?

Been thinking somewhat over the weekend. We all love the effects of having fast broadband speeds, but surely there have been poor effects as well. Broadband must have made companies millions of pounds and saved excessive amounts of time over the past several years, however it also means that files can be transferred much faster, resulting in loss of sales due to the fact that music, television can be downloaded much faster than driving to the nearest town.

"Shared content on one network was worth about £12 billion per year according to the research commissioned by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP)."

"Creative industries provide about 8% of British GDP. Digital copying of their products resulted in the estimated loss of 4,000 jobs in 2004."

"It claimed that 70% of those aged 15 to 24 do not feel guilt about downloading music for free from the Internet and 61% of the age group do not feel they should have to pay for the music they listen to, according to a recent survey." -

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?Illegal_downloading_costing_UK_%A312bn-a-year&in_article_id=675323&in_page_id=34

Perhaps the last quote is one which catches my attention for this project. We have not been given an age group to aim the site at, perhaps on a whole? However, I feel the most important are those aged between 15-24. Attitude towards file sharing and its effects on peoples lives is clearly not something that one thinks about when illegal downloading. But it is effecting jobs and careers everywhere, and this is something that needs to change and be made clear to those guilty.

P2P taking over downloads....

http://torrentfreak.com/p2p-statistics-080426/

Just found an article on the site above, stating that from 2007 - 2008 the total downloads of download software such as Limewire, moved towards torrent software, because of the more advanced searching capabilities, safety from viruses and speed.

"Unsurprisingly, P2P applications are more frequently installed on home computers versus PCs at the workplace. Nevertheless, almost one out of five PCs at work (18%) have at least one P2P application installed. For home computer this is little over 1 in three (36%)"

It is clear that there is competition between these developers to become the hosts for these illegal downloads. Of course it is not anything to do with these companies, because they only create the software and don't offer downloads themselves, just the ability to download these hosted torrents, however there continuous updates, must trouble the people concerned with law enforcing illegal downloads :

"Up until today, LimeWire’s BitTorrent functionality has been rather limited, especially compared to the full-featured BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent, Transmission and Vuze. However, this is all about to change according to the LimeWire team.

LimeWire’s lead developer Sam Berlin told TorrentFreak that they’ve done a complete overhaul of their BitTorrent implementation. The newest release is already available in Beta and now uses Arvid Norberg’s Libtorrent under the hood, which is a significant improvement."

CASE:

"STOCKHOLM — A Swedish appeals court on Tuesday overturned a landmark file sharing ruling that forced an Internet service provider to reveal an Internet user's identity to five publishers.
The ruling was the first one to be rendered on the basis of Sweden's new so-called "Ipred" law, which came into effect April 1 and gives copyright holders the right to require Internet service providers to reveal details of users who share files, paving the way for legal action.
The five publishers had sued the Ephone Internet service provider in order to obtain the IP address of a server which stocked 27 audio books to which they held the rights.
The Stockholm court of appeals said in its ruling that it had not been proven that the server was accessible to the public at large.
The court's chief judge had to intervene for the decision to be rendered because the court's four other judges were split on the affair.
In June, a lower court had ordered Ephone to reveal the identity of the person whose computer was connected to the IP address concerned.
Swedish Internet users have significantly cut down on illegal downloading since the Ipred law came into effect. The practice was so widespread that overall Internet traffic has plunged by 30 to 40 percent since the law came into force.
Ipred has been lauded by the music, film and video games industries but staunchly criticised by the Pirate Party, which wants to legalise Internet file sharing and beef up web privacy." -http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gHgZHQUJAgcIYNuG3OEOmCw4r-7Q

Sweden's approach to scaring the community with court cases and real life situations into punishment seems to have an effect.

The Independent, who released and article found here : http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/illegal-downloading-what-happens-if-youre-caught-1736013.html, describes the effects of illegal downloading and how it can effect you legally. Some good points:

- "distributing unauthorised files is a fine of up to £5,000 or six months' imprisonment"
- "Crown Court, which has the power to impose an unlimited fine and up to 10 years' imprisonment."
- "In some US states the online infringement of copyrighted music can be punished by up to three years' jail and £150,000 in fines."
- "You wouldn't go into a record shop and run off with a bag of CDs, the executives complain."

The British version appears to be called "digital britain", and is set up to crack down and protect the entertainment economy.

"While this debate has run back and forth for years, the Government has done little more than keep a watching brief, neither coming to the rescue of the music and film business by enforcing sanctions against illegal downloaders nor offering an amnesty to the guilty. That changed last month with a report from Digital Britain, an organisation set up by the Government to ensure that the nation exploits the internet to its full economic capacity. Launched last year, its aim was to establish a pattern for digital growth in the UK economy.

One of the biggest challenges Digital Britain had to look at was how to balance the interests of the internet user and the industries. The Government now promises to crack down on illegal file-sharing and supports sending warning letters to those making illegal downloads of music and films. Ofcom will also be allowed to release the identities of serial infringers to make it easier for music and film companies to sue them. Lord Carter, the communications minister, said: "We think online piracy is wrong. Creative companies, rights owners and individuals have a right to protection. We wish to put in place a legal framework that provides those protections."

Copyright project.

I've been unwell for the most of this last week, but I've had a look around at some interesting articles to build an understanding of where to go with this project into copyright. Because it's becoming such a serious matter does this mean the content will have to be directed formally towards an audience to achieve a desired effect? Well lets find out. The video above takes on some interesting points about how copyright is becoming more and more strict.

Now the project itself is directed towards the area of file sharing, something the government has decided it will be cracking down on (funnily enough since the recession came), copyrighted material being transfered peer to peer, or file shared. I find some interesting articles on the front of one of these sites that supply material on their server.

I found an article here (http://isohunt.com/ - Sunday 18th October 2009) describing, in full, a new torrent and file sharing system, developed by this highly illegal file sharing site.

"With a short review at Torrentfreak and a mention in my interview with BBC, I'm excited to finally announcing a public preview of our spinoff project Hexagon.cc ! We have spent 2 years developing this, and I assure you this will change the way you think of a BitTorrent site and file sharing.

How is Hexagon different? The biggest conceptual change is everything is shared within groups you can join and create yourself. These groups can be public, based on interests or made by independent bands, film makers, game studios, etc. for promotional purposes. They can also be made private, so you can very easily and comfortably invite your friends to a private group for sharing your private videos and such. You can do this on Youtube and similar sites, but with BitTorrent, you can share any type of file and not only video, and there's no restriction on file format or size (as much as you can seed). In Hexagon groups, you can also share both torrents as well as flash videos so you get the best of both worlds. This blend of BT and flash video sharing is an unique first.

Another big feature of Hexagon is organization. We've seen through the rise of sharing on BitTorrent, volume of spam rises with its popularity. We've addressed this on isoHunt with comments and rating powered by you, but on Hexagon we've taken organization and spam control to a whole new level technically. Hexagon is (currently) invite only, so if a spammer gets in somehow and start inviting other spammers and creating other accounts, we can chain ban such with relative ease. Hexagon have also taken a very sophisticated approach to files organization. Besides tags now commonly found on many sites, Hexagon did away with the traditional "Videos", "Audio", etc. general categorization and instead, you can label or link your torrent posts with Semantic Web resources. For example, a firefox 3.5 torrent should associate to the Firefox resource, and under the Firefox resource you can easily browse all torrents in association for different versions of Firefox. This is a definite first for any social media site, and goes a long way in organizing the huge volume of torrents being shared.

Hexagon.cc is currently open for more users to stress test the system. We would very much appreciate your feedback as we continue to add new features and improve the site!"

From the bold points outlined, Hexagon appears to be a legal and intellectual way of sharing LEGAL files over the Internet. My worry is, through the recent court cases of its sister site and route of this article Isohunt, there may be another file sharing site on its way which has more powerful capabilities, meaning the Government will again have to update their systems to tackle - resulting in more tax consuming technology.

If you want to check out more on isohunt and there cases look on there twitter - http://twitter.com/isohunt

Also we were required to visit the site Piratebay and find out about how they have been cracked down upon since the stricter regime on filesharing.

"A trial began in Norway on Monday in which the entertainment industry wants a major service provider to block access to The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent search engine.

Norwegian operator Telenor refused to block access to the site in June after it received a petition for a temporary injunction from a group of copyright holders, including the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Telenor maintains it will preserve access to The Pirate Bay barring a court order. Under Norwegian law, a service provider is not responsible for illegal activities enabled by providing Internet access, Telenor contends. The trial, in the district court for Asker and Bærum, is expected to last five days, according to a court official.

The Pirate Bay is a search engine and tracker for torrents, which are small files that enable the download of data from multiple sources on a peer-to-peer file-sharing system. The content is not stored by The Pirate Bay but instead on individual users' PCs around the world.

After legal trouble in its home country of Sweden, The Pirate Bay's operators have now distributed the servers that run the site around the world, although ISPs are easily able to block access to the domain.

The Pirate Bay -- one of the most popular BitTorrent sites -- has been a frequent target for the entertainment industry, with lawsuits filed other countries such as Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands.

In Denmark, some operators block The Pirate Bay while others don't, while in Italy efforts to block the site failed. A Netherlands court recently fined three men associated with The Pirate Bay for failing to block access to the site, but the case is on appeal.

(Mikael Ricknäs in Stockholm contributed to this report)" - http://www.pcworld.com/article/173468/in_norway_group_takes_the_pirate_bay_to_court.html