Final Project

My group, Takakelkat, has decided to meet in the library during Monday's class time. Room 127.

Woo-Hoo for Hulu?

Have you ever missed one of your favorite shows on television due to work or because you just plain forgot? Now there is a Web site called Hulu that was started by NBC Universal, Fox Entertainment Group (News Corp) and ABC Inc. (The Walt Disney Company) to enable people to watch television and movies online.
Hulu offers commercial-supported streaming video (in Flash Video format) of TV shows and movies from many networks and studios and their videos are currently offered only to users in the United States (Wikipedia). Hulu is using a geo-filtering mechanism that restricts access to its content to viewers only in a certain geographic location – the U.S (Brightcove). Hulu buys the rights to hundreds of shows and movies by selling ads to accompany the videos. It doesn’t have to buy the rights to some of the shows and movies, though, because they own most of them. There are a few networks who do not allow Hulu to share their videos with viewers, however. For example, one of my favorite shows Numb3rs airs on CBS on Friday nights. Most of the time I am either busy or I forget that it comes on then so I sit down at my computer to search Hulu and watch the recent episodes. Hulu doesn’t actually play the show though; it redirects you to either the CBS or TNT websites to watch episodes and clips from the show. Other shows that I like, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit for example, are only viewable on the USA Network Web site and even then I am lucky to find an entire recent episode to watch. Going back to the ads that Hulu sells to show as short commercials with the streaming videos, the ones I tend to see a lot are for Disney World, State Farm Insurance, and Sprint. These ads are a great way for companies to get viewed because they average about 30 seconds long as opposed to the regular commercial breaks during regularly aired television where people switch channels or get up to use the restroom or get something to eat or drink. Hulu also allows you to pause the show to do whatever you need to whenever you need to.
According to the Hulu Terms website:

You may not either directly or through the use of any device, software, internet site, web based service or other means remove, alter, bypass, avoid, interfere with, or circumvent any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary notices marked on the Content or any digital rights management mechanism, device, or other content protection or access control measure associated with the Content including geo-filtering mechanisms. You may not either directly or through the use of any device, software, internet site, web-based service or other means copy, download, stream capture, reproduce, duplicate, archive, distribute, upload, publish, modify, translate, broadcast, perform, display, sell, transmit or retransmit the Content unless expressly permitted by Hulu in writing.

I feel like this ties in to what Lessig talks about in his book Free Culture. One of the major recurring things I found in the chapter on “Property,” was his discussions on Jack Valenti (president of the MPAA) and Congress and the Constitution versus “creative property.” The Hulu Web site forbids you to copy in any way any of their content and Valenti agrees with that idea. Valenti thought that “Creative property owners must be accorded the same rights and protection resident in all other property owners in the nation.” (Lessig 117) But Lessig disagrees:

While “creative property” is certainly “property” in a nerdy and precise sense that lawyers are trained to understand, it has never been the case, nor should it be, that “creative property owners” have been “accorded the same rights and protection resident in all other property owners.” Indeed, if creative property owners were given the same rights as all other property owners, that would effect a radical, and radically undesirable, change in our tradition. (Lessig 118)

Lessig then goes on to say that his main point in the following few pages are to convince the reader that, “historically, Valenti’s claim is absolutely wrong.” I don’t fully agree or disagree with either of them. I can see both points and it makes me think back to a conversation we touched on in class and watched about in Rip! A Remix Manifesto. That topic being what Walt Disney did to his cartoons. First of all, he stole the idea from someone else and created an empire, but, he got involved with copyrights and laws and made it so that no one could do what he did to others. That is beyond unfair to the rest of us and brings up two more points that Lessig makes; that the past limits the creativity of the future and that we are less free today in how we use and create culture than ever before. No one is allowed to copy anything by the Disney Corporation without being slapped with a gigantic lawsuit. If anything even resembles anything Disney you could probably still get sued.
So how is Hulu able to show their copyrighted images? Simple: it mostly shows anything already owned by the founding companies, that way there is no doubt about ownership. As for people potentially stealing videos or images from the Hulu Web site, my bet is that if Hulu finds out (which they will if they have anything to do with The Walt Disney Company) they will be hit with a pricey lawsuit.

Smartphones for Smart People?

Here is a link to my article!

http://www.appstate.edu/~kb76117/SmartphonesforSmartPeople.htm

you should look at my ugly page!

The colors don't go well together; the photos in the table are different sizes; one of the links takes you somewhere other than it should... it's just bad.

Hurry Up and Wait

To be completely honest I don’t really remember my first actual encounter with the internet. All I can remember about it was that I was in middle school, maybe 6th or 7th grade, and we had a very slow dial-up connection from a company called CompuServe. I also remember the computer we had at the time was a Gateway and it was a pretty decent machine. I remember not being able to be on the internet for very long because it took up the only phone line we had and my parents didn’t want to miss any important calls. I mainly used it for emailing back and forth with a close friend who moved across country, since it was faster than regular mail. I also remember being at friends houses who had AOL and who were able to spend more time on the internet playing games and chatting away with other people, I was so jealous! I remember creating an email account through Yahoo! and thinking it was the coolest thing. I still have that angel_katy91888 account because I use it for things online that ask for my email in order to sign up for something or view something and I don’t want the site to clog my school email account. I would say that my attitude at that point was fairly indifferent to the internet, but that changed as soon as my dad got rid of the CompuServe dial-up deal and got wireless internet service.
Once we switched to the faster, easier to navigate internet I was hooked! My sister and I downloaded AOL Instant Messenger and would chat with our friends and download tons of music and essentially “clog up the computer,” according to my dad. We would also just spend hours late at night creating accounts with different websites like MySpace and Kiwibox and play games or just search random things. We would do this late at night because we were still not able to use the computer for anything other than school until homework was done or my dad was done with whatever he was doing (because we only had one central, family, computer).
I would say that initially my encounter with the internet was more like the realization of Vannevar Bush’s dream of the memex because it was so exciting and new and I couldn’t use it enough or couldn’t wait to see what else was out there. But now, looking back on the whole experience and thinking about the present and future of the internet, I see it as more of a threat to social and domestic life; just as Hawthorne saw the wood stove. If I hadn’t been so adamant about chatting with my friends over email or instant messenger (most of whom I would just see at school the next day anyway), I might have spent more time with my family or have done something more productive with my time.
I most definitely found myself agreeing with Hawthorne when he says “Truly may it be said, that the world looks darker for it. In one way or another, here and there, and all around us, the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life.” Even though he was basing all of this off of the invention of the wood stove, he knew that it would only get worse from there. This invention made it ok for people to not sit around a central location to get warm and talk, they were free to be off doing whatever they pleased in other areas of the house. Indeed it did get worse from there. I remember my mom making specified family dinner nights back when I was in middle school and high school, because we were all constantly go, go, go all week long. We had dinner together every Sunday night to try to catch up with one another about the past week’s events and anything that was coming up in the next week. Even though we had dinner together once a week it was never enough to slow down and actually talk about things. Looking back, I would rather have spent more time hanging out with my family than chatting with friends or playing stupid games online.