Masters of Media

In October 2004, Google announced the world their idea of making books available for everyone on the planet, by simply search for them using their search function. Google Books (previously called Google print) wanted to make an attempt to scan around 17 million titles within ten years[1]. The philosophy behind this project was that everyone [...]

What comes to mind when you think about piracy? Being but a simple new media-layman myself, my mind wanders off to the joy the free ‘file-sharing’ program Limewire († 2010) brought me in my teenage years and, more recently, downloading the newest episode of HBO’s Girls every Monday night. So yes, ambitiously heading for a [...]

We all know we are not getting a legal copy of the music and movies we download with our torrent clients, yet we all still download them. It’s easy, and it’s free. Piracy seems to have flourished when the internet started becoming a norm instead of being a novelty. But as becomes clear from the [...]

‘Internet pirates will always win. Hit one, countless others appear. Quickly.’ (The New York Times), ‘High Court backs internet piracy clampdown.’ (The Telegraph), ‘The US attempt to control internet piracy has sparked a fierce battle between the creative industries and the free speech lobby.’ (The Observer). Piracy. Over the last few years, it has become [...]

Everybody I know downloads films and music illegally. The ‘Piracy is a crime’ campaign against movie piracy does not seem to work. March 31 HBO will broadcast the first episode of season three of Game of Thrones. I — with millions of others — will be able to see it within a day. For a phenomenon as widely spread [...]

On February 15, 2012 library.nu was shut down since publishers accused the site of piracy. In his article The disappearing virtual library Christopher Kelty says that the website had offered ‘between 400,000 and a million digital books for free’, and if we believe him they were ‘not just any books – not romance novels or [...]

Scenario #1: Pirates are vicious freeloaders, the artists are their victims and the publishing industries have the artists’ best interests at heart. Scenario #2: the publishing industries are evil, capitalist scum who only care for money, the artists are their victims and the pirates are copyright-bucking rebels who fight for freedom of information and art. [...]

Yesterday I was looking around in the River Island. I saw this amazing t-shirt which I desperately wanted to have. However, since DUO-payday hasn’t taken place yet, I couldn’t buy the shirt. In the evening I wanted to see a movie so I grabbed my laptop and downloaded one. Both a t-shirt designer and a [...]

When I think about piracy, I think about a pirate with a wild beard, a wooden leg and a parrot on his shoulder. Kind of like Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, only perhaps less sexy. They do still exist, for example in Somalia where they have attacked several ships over the years. And [...]

You know that feeling when you’re in a candy store? Surrounded by mountains of chocolate, clouds of cotton candy and fountains of chocolate, the temptation becomes too much to bear. So what do you do? That’s right, when no one’s looking you grab a handful of sweets. Everyone would, right? The Internet has provided us [...]

Information means power Our society is an information Society. Adrian Johns says about information’s role: “[…] that information has indeed become a principal foundation of modern social, economic, and cultural order. As it has become the key commodity in the globalized economy, so control and management of information have vastly increased in overt importance.”[Johns, 2009:4] [...]

When watching the documentariesTPB AFK: The Pirate Bay, Away From Keyboard about a large lawsuit against The Pirate Bay and Google and the World Brain about Google’s plan to scan and publish every book ever made online in the biggest digital library one thing has become clear to me. Piracy or topics about Open Access [...]

Piracy, be it of software, music or books, is rarely spoken of in a positive light (Liang 356). Governments and organisations around the world are scrambling to stop copyright infringement from eating into profits. My relationship with piracy started at a young age. In the seventh grade, my friends and I would share pirated software [...]

  Piracy has been both a key aspect and influencer of the video gaming industry ever seen its conception. It has affected the way in which games are perceived, played, made, and the way in which they are sold. Due to the fear of lost profits, many gaming companies are choosing to adopt alternative means [...]

Piracy is not theft, let’s make this perfectly clear. Theft, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English, is “the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it”. Piracy, on the other hand, is the act of producing and distributing an (illegal) copy of a digital entity. Copying, see, does [...]

Today marks the tenth and final day of the Austin based multimedia festival South By Southwest. Running for more than 25 years, the festival is renowned for it’s huge number of performing artists, variety in content (from music, to film, to tech conferences), and revenue. Collectively, SXSW produces more revenue for the Austin, Texas economy [...]

There has been a shift from static to dynamic information visualization. Lately, information visualizations are being created by user generated input. Datasets can be created by scraping Twitter for certain keywords. The project “Pulse of the Nation” has visualized the mood of the U.S. during the week. Can we use the results to say or [...]

If journalism is to die, at least it dies in a better shape. By help of interactive visualizations, journalists have new means to tell stories and build context around them. It is already a few years since data journalism has found its way into the newsrooms. Popular newspapers such as The Guardian, The New York [...]

Living in the era of Big Data, data visualization is booming in science, marketing and journalism1. In this article I want to show that this booming phenomenon is also relevant to politics and social matters. As in that it is being used to enable a saver world. I will do this by discussing the mobile [...]

The Deleted City By zooming in and zooming out, you can navigate through the digital Pompeii of millions of abandoned homepages. While you pass the neighbourhood called ‘Pentagon’, you see military images and short stories about the army. Entering another district ‘Vienna’, you are confronted with information about classical music and ballet. Long before the [...]