CNET’s Greg Sandoval notes that a new Government Accountability Office report: Intellectual Property: Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods suggests that figures often cited by the film and music industries to represent losses due to piracy and illegal copying cannot be substantiated, and ignore the positive economic impacts of same.
The accountability office even noted the existence of data that shows piracy may benefit consumers in some cases.
“Some experts we interviewed and literature we reviewed identified potential positive economic effects of counterfeiting and piracy,” The GAO wrote. “Some consumers may knowingly purchase a counterfeit or pirated product because it is less expensive than the genuine good or because the genuine good is unavailable, and they may experience positive effects from such purchases.”
“Consumers may use pirated goods to ‘sample’ music, movies, software, or electronic games before purchasing legitimate copies,” the GAO continued. “(This) may lead to increased sales of legitimate goods.”
and
..experts disagree over the potential impacts of piracy on jobs. One leader in the field told the GAO that piracy kills jobs, while another said “any effects are unclear” because job loss in one sector may result in a “rise in other industries as workers are hired to produce counterfeits.”
April 8, 2010: In the second event of the Annenberg “Art of the Long View” series, communication professor Jonathan Taplin discusses the future of communication with Verizon CEO and chairman of the board Ivan Seidenberg.
Like any other small businessman, he assumed his Internet account was basically safe. Instead, he found himself another victim of the latest 21’st century crime wave, when his valuable domain name, VL.com, was hijacked in a high-tech heist. Told by a first-person witness to the crime, reconstructed from forensic evidence compiled in the aftermath, this gripping account takes you inside the mind of the attacker, showing in lay terms how domain thiefs bypass security at Internet registrars, and why domain name theft is a growing problem on the Internet that could strike any of us.
Read the story: Grand Theft Internet .
On Saturday April 17 Rhizome presents Seven on Seven, a new initiative connecting art and new technology.
Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new –be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine– over the course of a single day. The seven teams will unveil their ideas at a one-day event at the New Museum.
Seven on Seven technologists are Ayah Bdeir, David Karp, Jeff Hammerbacher, Andrew Kortina, Hilary Mason, Matt Mullenweg and Joshua Schachter.
Seven on Seven artists are Tauba Auerbach, Cao Fei, Aaron Koblin, Monica Narula, Marc Andre Robinson, Evan Roth, and Ryan Trecartin.
Seven on Seven Schedule on April 17, 2010
Opening Remarks: 2:30pm
Presentations: 3-6:30pm
Cocktail Reception in New Museum Skyroom: 6:30-8:30pm
Tickets $350 (Students $75) via Eventbrite.
Both events are free and open to the public.
The Cardozo School of Law is at 55 5th Avenue NYC (bet 12th & 13th St)
hackNY.org is excited to announce applications are now open — for students and for startups — for the 2010 student-startup internship program (through 11:59 pm NYC time Apr 30).
Our Objective
Establish a sustainable, repeatable summer program matching computationally and quantitatively expert NYC students with NYC startups, to:
• Assist in funding student summer internships,
• Provide pedagogical lectures to develop needed skills which are not obtained in traditional curricula,
• Establish a community of NYC tech/entrepreneurship-oriented students
• Strengthen the community of NYC tech-oriented startups
• Strengthen the entrepreneurial community in NYC more generally
• Facilitate quantitative and computational students securing entrepreneurial opportunities post-graduation
STARTUPS: please apply via http://hackny.org/a/startups/
STUDENTS: please apply via http://hackny.org/a/students/
(More …)
NewTeeVee reports Google will soon make its VP8 video codec open source. The company is scheduled to officially announce the release at its Google I/O developers conference next month, a source with knowledge of the announcement said
At our ISOC-NY “Freedom in The Cloud” event in February Eben Moglen challenged the tech community to come up with a free, open, and decentralized social networking platform. The folks at OneSocialWeb are working on breeding just such an animal..
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