Digital Economy Act

The Digital Economy Act 2010 is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Introduced by (Lord Mandelson), it received Royal Assent on 8 April 2010, and came into force on 8 June 2010 (with the exception of certain sections that came into force on 8 April regulating digital media.

Wikinomics "The Five Big Ideas"

5) The next issue I am going to look at from the five big ideas is Perfect Storm.
Perfect Storm looks at three things;

• Technology (web 2.0)
• Demographics - This is where young people are describes as being 'digital natives' due to the fact they have grown up in a collaborative virtual world that comes naturally and instinctively to them.
• Economics - This is the development of the global economy where business' can and must think of the market as international.
  

These three things combine to make working without them impossible. The traditional structures of national production have declined and reduced to a point that trying to work without them is like trying put out a fire with petrol.
An example of this is the decline of small business' on the high street. More and more small brands and shops are going bust due to people staying home and shopping online for their things. Without acknowledging the web and using it too it's full potential a business will struggle and many have.

Wikinomics "The Five Big Ideas"

3) Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams brought out their theory, Wikinomics, in 2006 and I am going to apply one of the five big ideas to the media online. The media now has been democratised by peering, free creativity and we media created by Dan Gilmor, or so we think.
People would argue that an example of this would be wikileaks. I however disagree. The concept of wikileaks sounds democratised but in reality it is controlled by those either creating it and those who want rid of it.

Jullian Assange created wikileaks to show the world the hidden documents that the public doesn't get so see or read. I don't believe his intentions are all innocent and good. He tends not to think about the people who he is leaking this information too. Some things, I believe, we are entitled to, but in a BBC documentary I have seen on wikileaks, Jullian endangered the lives of people with some of the documents leaked. It named the people that had helped in the Afghanistan war and caused them to be targeted by the Taliban. He could have blacked out the names of those involved, being democratic, but didn't and dictated how he wanted it doing.

On the other hand, the people that want rid of Wikileaks are also anti-democracy. Jullian has been accused of indecencies in another country, uncomfortably close to when Wikileaks became increasingly popular and started to collect power. Those running the newspapers are either for or against wikileaks and the government has a lot of power over select newspapers, imposing their point of view onto the public. This is very democratic at all. The public doesn't want to be force fed opinions, especially when we haven't taken part in Wikileaks, but that is exactly what they are doing.

Wikinomics "The Five Big Ideas"

2. Free Creativity is a natural and positive outcome of the free market, so attempting to regulate and control online "remix" creativity is like trying to hold back the tide. The happy medium is achieved by a service such as Creative Commons, which provides licenses which protect IP while at the same time allowing others to remix material within limits.



Fan made videos are extremely popular and are growing every year. Some videos make the actors famous in their own right because of miming to a song or dancing to it. In some cases, the remix's of songs get more hits on YouTube than the original song by band or artist- a lot of artists are aware of the remixing and copying of their material, but most are quite good hearted about it.

An example of Free Creativity close to heart is the production of our A2 music video "Brick by Boring Brick" which incorporates the audio of a well known band "Paramore" to our graphics and visual images

Wikinomics "The Five Big Ideas"

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams published Wikinomics in 2006. Along with Chris Anderson's The Long Tail theory, this is the other "big idea" about business and commerce in the online age.

1. Peering
Free sharing of material on the internet is good news for businesses when it cuts distribution costs to almost zero but bad news for people who want to protect their creative material and ideas as intellectual property (IP).
The music business in the online age presents a balanced argument of positives and negatives of free sharing online

Positives:
"Spotify", "We7" and "LastFM" are all examples of free music sharing websites that are legally allowed to let the public listen to hundreds of thousands of playlists for free whilst online. This is made legal as the distributors of these sites will pay a proportion of copyright money to the artists that appear on their music database- therefore some revenue is still produced from the free listening. Advertising and marketing of the music on the site will also generate a revenue to keep the websites running.

Negatives:
Illegal sharing websites such as "Limewire" and torrent websites such as "Bittorrent" use downloaded content from the web and allow people to download it at absolutely no cost. Extreme cases of download have resulted in heavy fines if caught by the police and in 2009 a woman in America who had downloaded over 15000 songs and videos via limewire faced a fine of £1 per song. Artists do not allow their music to be given out for free as it generates no revenue to them, and large metal band Metallica quoted "I wouldn't ask you to come and fix my plumbing for free so you can't have our work for free".

The Social Network

"On a fall night in 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius Mark Zuckerberg sits down at his computer and heatedly begins working on a new idea. In a fury of blogging and programming, what begins in his dorm room soon becomes a global social network and a revolution in communication. A mere six years and 500 million friends later, Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in history... but for this entrepreneur, success leads to both personal and legal complications."

Key issues raised:
Copyrights to the idea and company of Facebook (IP- Intellectual Property)
Privacy (Photo's of girls and friends in Harvard, put on the web)
Advertising (Investments from companies eager to promote the site)

Chris Anderson's Long Tail Theory 2006

The Long Tail, in a nutshell

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

Chris Anderson's most significant examples were iTunes, YouTube and social networking sites and his theory was spread quickly through the use of viral marketing (word of mouth). A lot of writing about the changing nature of media has included Anderson's theory since it was first published in 2006.

He states that in the pre-broadband era, companies and distributors were interested in blockbuster hits and best selling products however now there is a realisation that adding up all of the niche consumption might amount to as much revenue as the units sold of the peak material.

The music industry is affected massively by the online age and large multinational companies such as HMV, Amazon and Play stock thousands of titles in their "Virtual Warehouse" on the internet however only big selling chart CD's are available in the high street shops. As well as this, every song imaginable is available for download on music databases such as iTunes, whereas if there was an iTunes shop on the high street it would be likely to only sell the most popular tunes at the present time in order to maximise revenue.

An example of a huge chart topping CD available in all high street shops is "Tinie Tempah- Discovery", the singles released so far have had a combined 70 million views on YouTube and have been in the Download chart repeatedly as being the most downloaded on iTunes. Shops such as HMV will stock up to 75 copies of the album on the shelves in the shops and in the "virtual warehouse" an endless amount of copies are available.

Useful Links

http://mediaandtheonlineage.blogspot.com/ - Class Blog with exam information

https://hsfc.blackboard.com/ - College VLE Blackboard

feed://feeds.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/media/rss - Media Guardian RSS Feed