SESSION 15: EXERCISES FOR DISCUSSION AND FINAL TASK
2. EXERCISES FOR DISCUSSION:
2.1 What do these words suggest you when you hear them?
- Intellectual Property
- Wikipedia
- Piracy
- Web browser
- copyright
- entertainment
- entrepeneurs
- economic growth
- knowledge
- songs
- movies
- software
- books
- games
- operating systems
- piracy
- identity theft
- losing passwords
- pop-ups
- phishing
- cyber-bullying
- spam mail
- other...
2.4 DISCUSSION: Here are some questions you can try asking yourself before you come to our discussion on Wednesday:
a) What springs to mind when you hear the word ‘piracy’?
b) What do you think about what you read?
c) Do you think intellectual copyright should be protected?
d) Do you ever download things that you shouldn’t?
e) If no one pays for music, games and movie, people won’t make them, or won’t make them as good. What do you think of this?
f) Do you think SOPA and PIPA will get passed?
g) What do you think of Wikipedia’s action in “going dark” for 24 hours?
h) What punishment should sites that host or share pirated stuff have?
i) What do you think of the closure of the site Megaupload.com?
j) It is likely the actions of Internet companies like Wikipedia will defeat the bills in Congress. Is this kind of power in the hands of sites good?
k) How can the entertainment and fashion industries better protect their copyrighted material (movies, songs, etc.)?
l) What punishment should be given to copyright violators?
m) So many people nowadays think downloading is a way of life and don’t see the illegality of it. Is it too late to go back?
n) Would a bill protecting intellectual copyright lead to greater censorship?
o) Would the proposed bills “hurt economic growth and chill innovation”?
p) Is charging 99 cents for songs and similarly low prices the way to go ?
q) What would a world without free knowledge be like?
r) What questions would you like to ask Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s boss?
PREPARING A DISCUSSION IS FUNDAMENTAL:
THIS MUST BE DONE IN TWO DIRECTIONS:
FIRST, YOU NEED TO LEARN NEW VOCABULARY AND EXPRESSIONS THAT YOU WILL HAVE TO USE FOR THE DISCUSSION.
SECONDLY, YOU HAVE TO PREPARE THE TOPIC BY LOOKING UP INFORMATION IN THE INTERNET, BOOKS, ENCYCLOPAEDIAS.
THIS WAY YOU WILL FEEL MUCH MORE CONFIDENT AND AT THE SAME TIME YOU WILL HAVE MUCH MORE TO TALK ABOUT IN THE ORAL SESSION.
FINAL TASK:
HERE IS ONE FINAL TASK THAT YOU MAY DO IN ORDER TO COVER THE FOUR SKILLS YOU SHOULD FOCUS ON WHEN LEARNING A LANGUAGE: LISTENING, READING, SPEAKING AND WRITING.
Write a composition and leave it in the blog as a comment to Session 15, I will edit it in the blog so that everybody can learn from other people´s opinions:
- Express your opinion about SOPA, the anti-piracy legislation.
- Does the Internet offer a world with free knowledge? Express your opinion.
Nowadays, the internet has become in a virtual space in which outnumber of things, ideas, knowledge, businesses, dreams, whatever you can imagine can be shared with each other. Although the internet is the best way to spread knowledge currently, the future of this mean of communication will be completely unknown for our mind.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, the web is the place where there is the most amount of information humanity has never had. Only it can be compared with the invention of printing some centuries ago. Maybe it was the beginning of the recent spread of knowledge and ideas all over the world but with the difference of technological advances. Thanks to these advances, the internet is the fastest way to extend new thoughts, experiences, discoveries, etc.
Secondly, the internet is the best path to keep our desires of improve ourselves in different ways like arguing different topics and point of view, supporting new discoveries and other innovative life style, besides, developing new economic system, and so on. Thus, the world is alive and everyday we do not go to bed without having learnt something new.
Finally, new ways to meet people and keep relationships have been invented as well, and a clear example of that is what is called social network, like facebook, twiter, twenty, etc. All of them are websites where you can share diverse sorts of experiences, photos, videos, opinions, and them cannot be only showed with the help of a computer but with phones too or better said i-phones.
In conclusion, in my opinion the internet is the best way to communicate with other people and you can also enjoy it in freedom. But on the other hand, if we want to enjoy the internet for a long time, I think that some rules might be established in order to respect the work of some professionals which economic resources are being dramatically reduced because of piracy.
Miguel Ruano.
I completely disagree with the anti-piracy legislation , the Internet is the biggest source of knowledge, everything you want to know, it is on Internet.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion the knowledge is made for share it, is unuseful know something and keep it to yourself.
The great advantage of using the Internet is the possibility of share everything you want to with everybody independent of the place, hour or language. From my point of view is the best and faster way of comunication in the world.
This new legislation try to avoid the sharing of information, and it is a great mistake, for example, my job require a big use of Internet, I work as computer engineer and I need to search information about how do something depending of the programming language I am using, If this information is not shared my job could be very difficult and slow.
In addition to that, I consider that to share something such as movies or music, is illegal as long as you have a profit if you do it.
In conclusion, people who have made this legislation, should think that the only one responsible of piracy is the price of everything that has a copyright. Pay more than 20 Euros for a CD or DVD is a rip-off.
In the last few years there has been nothing in the world that has grown faster than technology. As a matter of fact, Internet websites have revolutionised the industry company at the whole as well as have become part of our life, so today having an encyclopaedia at home for information or searching for especial brands and cheaper items from place to place it appears to be something of the past.
ReplyDeleteThe truth is that many web-sites began as simple internet bookstores but today have basically evolved into a cyber-bazaar or a flea market, offering items from electronics and CDs to cosmetics, cars and even auction goods and enhancing our lifestyle and economy with the click of an icon.
It is undeniable that the record industry is in crisis thanks to listeners who prefer to download music from the Internet rather than buy CDs, indeed it is absurd searching for culprits, since the CD arrived in the 80s in an unprotected and uncompressed form, anyone who understood the way that the computer works, could see that would be a problem for them.
In addition, the same is happening with TVs piracy, where the number of US downloads has been doubled recently. In common with many branches of the entertainment industry, the challenge for TV companies is to come up with an easy business that allows users to consume what they want at any given time. Actually, outside the US, fans sometimes have to wait endlessly before their favorite show airs on TV in their own country, and the same happens with the film industry; many people are simply not patient enough or do not want pay the high price of the cinema ticket and opt to download them in desperation, so if they have the chance to download them they do it.
Personally, it is going to be a hard task to put a halt in piracy since hackers and software pirates usually find ways to work around older versions of anti-piracy software, and although the development of anti-piracy programs to combat this type of activity is in constant process, the Internet piracy will not disappear due to the outrageous prices that consumer have to pay for everything.
Nowadays, several websites such as megaupload, wikipedia and Reddit, _which share information with millions of people all over the world_, are in danger because of an unfair anti-piracy legislation (SOPA), which pretends to protect copyright holders.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, piracy has existed since human race started doing businesses, and never it has stopped. So, eradicating this illegal way to earn money is extremely difficult. Neither a new legislation like SOPA nor closing websites are the solution.
Secondly, sharing information creates new communications betwen us, improves new services, and, in addition, helps economy to grow. SOPA has been created in order to avoid ilegal downloads; but, as a consequence, many people will lose their jobs.
Finally, I do not think that SOPA is a suitable solution for entertainment, pharmaceutical and fashion industries. Furthermore, we cannot live in a world with free knowledge.
To sum up, we can’t keep in silence more time. We have to fight against people who only want to fill their pockets with our money instead to protecting our rights.
Angel Molina