Court Case eases up on Piracy

What is a downloaded movie worth? What is a reasonable punishment for a person who downloads a movie, and one that uploads a movie? Is piracy theft, or should it just be consider plagiarism?

Internet piracy is still a relatively new phenomenon, most countries are currently far from nailing down their legislation on the spectacle, and the debate is well under way on how piracy should be treated in the justice system. Sweden, being a fore runner when it comes to both Internet piracy, and piracy prevention, is still leagues from a solid answer.

Therefore, leading judgments are important, and since the Internet and information sharing is global, it is very interesting to examine how other countries deal with their cases of piracy. A case well worth putting under the microscope is a subpoena from the U.S.; Malibu Media Llc vs. John Does.

Malibu Media Llc saw how some of their movies (and other IP products) were leaked on the Internet. The company then tracked the IP-address used for sharing these files over a Bittorrent protocol, and based on that IP-address the company found the uploader. This time it happened to be a home user rather than a public hotspot. Subsequently geo-location was used to find the physical address, and the subscription service used, and thereby identified the physical person behind the uploads.

Or so they thought.

The law suit is as a classic example of what may cause many pirates to choose to hide their IP-address, i.e. example via VPN services, but interestingly enough, the judge in Florida decided to go a different route. The judge ruled that although the address was correctly identified, you cannot rule out the possibility that someone else used the computer. Home networks and home computers are after all often shared by several people.

Similar judgments have been identified previously in the U.S., and seems to be increasingly common. In Sweden we have had relatively few court cases of piracy that had been triad on the basis of IP-address, but this case may be setting the stage for how these cases can come to be interpreted.

What do you think about internet piracy? Please comment below. 

Praising Intelligence might Undermine Development

Yes, you read that right. Praising intelligence may not evolve the thinking ability, but rather have quite the opposite effect, possibly halting it all together. This startling discovery was recently publicized by Claudia M. Mueller, Carol S. Dweck from Columbia University and Sheri R. Levy, Stanford University.

The study compares the performance of children after they’ve been praised for their intelligence (“you must be smart”) versus their effort (“you must have put a lot of effort into that”). The kids were asked to perform a task, and upon completion they were praised in one of the two manners. After this they where then given a series of harder problems to try to solve.

The kids who where praised for their effort increased in the number of problems they solved. However, those who where told that they were smart showed a frightening decrease.

What’s the difference? Those being told that they’re smart are taught that abilities are fixed. If you’re finding a puzzle hard, then it must be because you’re not very good at that, and you should try something else. Kids taught that results are based on effort see the hard puzzles as something they can learn to do, and then they do so.

In a second set of tests, kids were asked what type of puzzles they like to solve, and then given four options. The first three were pretty similar: “problems that aren’t too hard, so I don’t get many wrong,” “problems that are pretty easy, so I’ll do well,” and “problems that I’m pretty good at, so I can show that I’m smart.” 

However the last option is different: “problems that I’ll learn a lot from, even if I won’t look so smart.”

The first three options are “performance” options, they’re all about looking good, or getting things right. The last option is a “learning” option, and it values knowledge and growth over performance.

The study concluded that children often selected puzzle-options based upon the type of praise they had previously gotten. Children praised for their intelligence choose tasks which are easy and make them look good, but children praised for their effort choose tasks which are hard, and which will teach them more.

Do you think about praise and feedback, and how you direct it? Comment below...