Bilski v. Kappos is the case being argued in the Supreme Ct. which hopes to resolve whether the Federal Circuit erred by holding that a “process” must be tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or transform a particular article into a different state or thing (”machine-or-transformation” test), to be eligible for patenting under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The Court’s precedent declining to limit the broad statutory grant of patent eligibility for “any” new and useful process beyond excluding patents for “laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas.” Is at the heart of the debate. Similar to the idea/expression dichotomy limit on copyrights, where expressions are protected and ideas are available for public exploitation, Patents too have limitations grounded in the 1^st Amendment. However, patents are slightly more complicated because methods of doing business and processes can be protected by patents. The question is whether a special test for processes conflicts with the congressional intent of supporting the technological arts.

The issues regarding the precedent of the machine or transformation test, and it’s constitutionality, lies in what the court will interpret as what it means to be tied to a particular machine. If one attaches ‘in a computer’ to an application for a process patent, is that enough to pass the machine-or-transformation test? The patent office has been saying ‘no,’ that innovation needs to demonstrate a transformation of matter or tie to a machine function.

Bilkski’s claimed invention was a method for managing the consumption risk costs of a commodity sold by a commodity provider. Bilski developed equations which initiate a series of transactions, identifies market participants, and evaluates the risk of  a commodity provider. When their “invention” reached the patent office, the first examiner found 5 of their 9 claimed invention applications to be patentable. Bilski appealed, however upon appealing received a rejection on all claims, because of the machine-or-transformation test, and so began their struggle over patentability a digital age.

According to Bilski, an invention should rely on a “useful, concrete, and tangible result” in order to receive a patent, as stated in the Federal Circuits precedent in At&t v. Excel Inc. This would mean that when a claim containing a mathematical formula implements or applies that formula in a structure of processes which, when considered as a whole, is performing a function, patent laws protect them. The respondent Kappos, along with the majority of the amicus breifs is under the impression that The Patent Act should be interpreted so that the machine-transformation test stands. In their defense is a trilogy of supreme Ct. Cases that have all maintained the machine or transformation test. Meaning that software can contribute to claims for patents only to the extent the software is combined with a special purpose machine, or is used in a process that transforms matter. The question on which will yield more innovation is up for debate, and 65 amicus briefs, the most of all cases in the Supreme Ct. this session, attempt to answer this question.

It is true that all software is at a certain level represented as algorithms for computers. The fact that these algorithms are actually readable by people, complicates the issue of patentability. Natural laws and phenomena cannot qualify for patent protection, and abstract ideas are not eligible because they don’t serve a purpose.” However, what about useful abstract ideas, or the fact that writing and developing these algorithms cost lost of time and money? Currently the US patent office mandates that abstract ideas must be applied to a practical use before they can be patented, and also undergo the machine transformation test, regardless of the language of the section 101 in the US Patent Act of 1952.

Bilski obviously hopes to get rid of this special test for processes, arguing the precedent conflicts with the plain language of section 101. Their ideas are that commercial business methods should be patentable, if they pass the useful concrete and tangible result test. Stating that “adding the additional test is unconstitutional and restricting.” They hope that the court will interpret section 101 broadly enough to protect methods of doing business. In their eyes, concerns over potentially vague or trivial patents for business methods should be addressed by the other requirements for patentability, such as novelty, non-obviousness, and definite claiming. Their effective summary is that the machine or transformation test has no basis in the patent statue and conflicts with the courts precedent.

The respondents Kappos believes that section 101 is designed to protect industrial and technological processes, and that it excludes methods directed to organize human activity. The crucial point is that the machine transformation test, is a way the court can implement a filter by which to test individual cases on their patent eligibility as opposed to accepting a broad and encompassing approach. Currently the court views software code as an idea without physical embodiment, merely information as a detailed set of instructions. One danger is that by implementing a standard for processes that is too strict might hurt the economy of innovation.

Kappos is under he impression that section 101 is already interpreted broadly enough, and imposes meaningful limits on the scope of patent protection, and that the alternative tests proposed by Bilski do not appropriately limit patent protection. Since the process of Bilski’s invention only pertain to human activity it should not be protected by patents, and would need to be tied to a particular machine or apparatus in order to qualify. Something that would turn the abstract idea of computer code into a process with a meaningful purpose. They believe that this test is actually beneficial to innovation, because it would allow for a more free exchange of information and ideas.

DRM is one of the topics we covered in class that really caught my attention.  I think it is interesting how some industries, mainly music, have suffered a huge backlash against DRM while others such as the movie industry or software industry do not have the same negative reaction.  DRM, at its most basic level is a way for the rights holder to determine what can and can not be done with their digital content.  This can range from the ability to share this contented with others on the same account, how many times a year you can print the content, or if the content will be able to be used on more than one device.

How the DRM system is set up is very anti-user.  The rights holder sets the boundaries of use and no matter whom the user is, they can either accept the license provided or loose the opportunity to legally use the material.  A new model that is gathering support is one that uses a protocol and a language to express communication between consumers and copyright holders, such as Rights Extension Language (REL) extensions. A REL defines a language and vocabulary that enable the specification and interpretation of usage rules in a clear and unambiguous way.

Basically by utilizing REL, there does not have to be a one size fits all approach to DRM. Say, that the rights holder wants to allow students more freedom than non-students, the rights holder can have a set of rights for students, and another set of rights for non-students.  It is basically like those pick-your-own adventure stories.  I receive a set price for a product dependent of how I want to use the product and how my wants match up with what the rights holder has allowed. It’s not a perfect system, but it seems that if the kinks were worked out it would be a fairer system then the take-it-or-leave-it approach.

The largest controversy’s surrounding DRM involves privacy. Richard Stallman points out that privacy violations are usually hidden from the user unlike other DRM, which the user notices when they are not allowed to use the content how they want.  Some examples of Privacy violations in the online music and movie industry’s are, MusicNet, Rhapsody, MovieLink and CinemaNow. All of these programs allowed themselves access to files of the users computers that users could not easily access or change.  These files such as index.dat stored not only information about the use of the specific program but all browsing history.

The most infamous of these privacy breeches was Sony XCP, in which US-CERT, a part of Homeland Security, advised, “Do not install software from sources that you do not expect to contain software, such as an audio CD.” Most recently, Spore, a game from EA, shipped with software known as SecuROM, which installs a root kit like Sony XCP. EA requires the player to authenticate the game online upon installation and then every 10 days.  The product key of an individual copy of the game would only be authenticated on up to three computers, yet was increased to 5.  A class action suit was filed in September 2008.  Interestingly, Spore, was also the most bit-torrented game of 2008.

It now seems that the music industry has backed off from DRM.  DRM instead of protecting against piracy seems to lead to more piracy just to spite the draconian methods of the rights holder.  Like spore in 2008, music, which was most heavily DRMed, was also the most pirated media.  Music, however, with the introduction of itunes plus, which uses social rather than traditional DRM has left the music industry practically DRM free.

This short history leads us to e-books.  I find that e-books are at an important place because they can go the way of the music industry and DRM everything, which creates a black market for goods, or can adopt less strict DRM practices. The main thing that seems to hurt all DRMed content is that it has interoperability problems.  If you spend x amount of dollars at the Amazon store buying .azm file type e-books, and decide that you want to buy the new Nook, you are out x amount of money since your files can not be views on the Nook.  However, if all e-books used .azm then there wouldn’t be an interoperability problem. However, Amazon is not about to free up its format or become compatible with the unofficial industry standard ePub.

Amazon’s e-book store reminds me a lot of pre-itunes plus Apples itunes. Amazon like apple benefits from the DMCA, since no one but Apple or Amazon is allowed to make players for iTunes Music songs or .azm e-books, and no one but Apple/Amazon can sell you proprietary file-format music that will play on the iPod/Kindle. Amazon has created an e-Book ecosystem where their customers purchased content solely through Amazon. As Apple had done with digital music, Amazon is now doing with e-Books.

Unlike the Kindle, most e-book readers, such as the Sony reader and the new Nook, support ePub. Epub is the closest thing the industry has to a standard that allows interoperability between devices. ePub (electronic publication) is a common file format for digital books developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). ePub is an xml-based format that is meant to function as a single format that publishers and conversion houses can use in-house, as well as for distribution and sale. Doug Gottlieb, vice president of digital products for Barnes & Noble.com believes, “Standards are good for everyone. They enable more supported eReading devices from which to choose, and these options allow device manufacturers to focus on innovation and differentiation of their products to better serve their customers.” He goes on to say, “the ePub standard allows them to read that same book on their office computer the next day or on a dedicated e-Book reader, which never has a backlight because of e-ink limitations, on their commute.”   Epub is now tied to adobe which allows DRM to be added to the open format.

The shift that is occurring based on the almost universal adoption on ePub is a move to social rather then traditional DRM. Social DRM at its core is meant to tie the user’s personal information- be it their name, phone number, or credit card, to their copy of an e-book.  The biggest issue right now is to determine, what kind of information should a social DRM system embed. The user would be able to share that e-book but the fact that they would also be sharing their private information with their 1000 closest friends is seen to be a large deterrent.  This method is being championed by Adobe’s Bill McCoy. If all else fails, it would be easier for the rights holder to track down pirates if their information was embedded into the media.

This is getting super long, but I think that if ePub becomes the standard, and that there are fairly priced e-books on the market that are protected by social DRM, so that there are no interoperability issues between devices, and the user was allowed to time and space shift, the main reasons for piracy would be gone.  Yes, there will always be people who want something for nothing, but if the content industries treat everyone by the lowest common denominator they are creating rather than dissuading pirates.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the ephemeral culture of the web, and “exercising our right to remember.” It is an Internet Library, collecting information and material, and making it easily searchable and accessible to its members and patrons. The Internet Archive operates out of San Francisco, and was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle. Kahle is an MIT graduate who was an entrepreneur pioneering various other search software such as WAIS and Alexa, before selling these for profit companies to fund the launch of the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive has expanded over the years and now hosts more than three petabytes of information, which amounts to 150 times the amount of information housed in the Library of Congress. This information is broken up into five categories—Text, Moving Image, Audio, Software, and Web. The text archive draws heavily on partnerships with the Library of Congress and Project Gutenberg, as well as other public and university libraries. The moving image archive houses classic films in the public domain, TV shows, newsreels, cartoons, and government videos. The audio archive includes radio programs, audio books, lectures, podcasts, and the live music archive which contains concerts by a variety of bands. The web category takes shape in the form of the Wayback Machine, a sort of time capsule which holds more than 150 billion webpages dating back to 1996. The archive systematically and routinely crawls the web capturing the internet in time so that it can be looked back upon and studied even after pages have changed and been shut down.

The Wayback Machine is, however, where the Internet Archive often treads a dangerous line in terms of copyright infringement, as it caches and displays other people’s works without permission or licensing. In 2005 the archive was in fact sued for copyright infringement by Healthcare Advocates. Healthcare Advocates had previously been involved in another lawsuit in which old versions of their website, which had been retrieved using the Wayback Machine, were used against them in court. The Internet Archive operates off of an opt-out rather than opt-in policy, and so will ignore any pages with the directive robots.txt written into them. Healthcare Advocates testified to having included this instruction, and yet the law firm had managed to access its pages nonetheless, apparently by firing repeated requests for the information, a small portion of which went through. Thus Healthcare Advocates sued the law firm for violating the DMCA by circumventing DRM in addition to its copyright complaint against the Internet Archive. The case was ultimately settled out of court, preventing a court decision that would have cleared up some of the grey area surrounding caching of information for archiving purposes, but it is likely, based on other cases, that the archive’s use would have been deemed fair use.

Aside from its copyright concerns, the Internet Archive finds itself often fighting for status as a library rather than a search engine. The US affords many provisions to protect and enable libraries in their archiving work, and the Internet Archive feels it needs the same provisions in order to fulfill its goal to the utmost. While the Archive was officially recognized as a library by the state of California in 2007, previous legislation specifically excluded digital libraries from the legal classification. The Copyright Act of 1998 exempted libraries from copyright infringement so long as they were acting under certain conditions in service of the public good. However, it limited the classification of library to those institutions operating out of a physical premise. Because of how accessible the internet is, it allows nearly anyone to set up some sort of digital archive or library, and so the statute could not extend to cover all of these cases, but at the same time it excluded large-scale archive endeavors such as the Internet Archive. While the Internet Archive is not included in this designation, it has been able to go far beyond the digitization projects taken on by physical institutions such as the Library of Congress which strove to digitize its holdings, but never accomplished anywhere close to the amount of information stored by the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive found itself again facing the importance of being recognized as a library in 2007 when it was issued a National Security Letter (NSL) by the FBI. The FBI issues about 50,000 NSLs a year, all of which mandate silence by the recipient and do not require any sort of court order. The Patriot Act, however, protects libraries from having to respond to these inquests as they are authorized to protect their patrons’ privacy. Thus when the Internet Archive was served with a letter requesting the name, address, and online activity of a user, Brewster Kahle felt it his duty in the tradition of librarians, to fight back and resist the letter. Represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, he also claimed that the gag order was unconstitutional. Remarkably, the FBI withdrew the letter and dropped the gag order, making it only the third time ever that they had retracted a NSL. Kahle was recognized for his fight for civil liberties, and he was overjoyed with the success of the battle, having accomplished his goal of showing others that these notices are something that can be pushed back against and fought.

Kahle’s activism extends into the realm of copyright as well. The current copyright laws, especially those regarding Orphan Works, seem unjust to those such as the archive who are dedicated to opening up knowledge and information and exposing it to public access. In 2005 Kahle, in partnership with another film archive, filed Kahle v. Ashcroft, a suit claiming that that current copyright laws were unconstitutional due to the ever-lengthening terms of copyright combined with the fact that copyright holders were no longer required to register their claims. The judge, however, dismissed the case without hearing arguments referencing the decision of the previous case Eldred v. Ashcroft in which the decision had been against Kahle’s claims. The fight continues and so does the Internet Archive continue to grow, ever expanding exponentially despite restrictions.

Electronic books, also referred to as e-books, have grown in popularity with the development of electronic readers including the Sony Reader, Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes & Noble’s upcoming Nook. According to the Association of American Publishers, the sales of electronic books has increased by 68.4 percent in 2008, and in 2009 sales have since jumped 177 percent to $96.6 million. Although e-books only comprise 1.5 percent of the overall publishing industry, the increase in popularity presents a shift in the way books are being read.

As a result of the increase in the sales of electronic books, the present business model for this medium is in the midst of changing. Therefore, the intersection of copyright, commerce, and culture for e-books provides a critical perspective of how digital forms are beginning to alter how people consume media. Project Gutenberg is a program that allows for users to download over 30,000 e-books to their laptops, e-readers, or iPhones for free. This project allows for the spread of those books in the public domain to be freely available to mass society in an electronic form that is easily downloaded.

In order to compete with this new business model, established businesses such as Amazon, Sony, and Barnes & Noble are developing their own forms of e-readers to hold e-books. Over 5,400 public libraries across the country are also turning to an electronic model to rent out books through the format known as ePub, allowing users to download books for 14 days from compatible libraries. The iPhone also has a free application called Stanza that allows users to download e-books into PDF format on their phones, and the e-book community Wattpad allows users to download e-books to hundreds of models of phones. Convenience and transportability have become two key characteristics in the spread of e-book culture.

The electronic book market has its fair share of limitations that prevent some of the freedoms that a physical book provides consumers. Digital rights management places restrictions on content purchased from Amazon so that users can only download it to Kindle e-readers. The landmark case, Tasini et al v The New York Times, involved the National Writers Union suing The New York Times Company for violations of the copyrights of freelance writers. The New York Times Company was selling freelance articles to LexisNexis without proper compensation to authors. The court ruled that electronic rights were part of a writer’s copyrights.

Electronic publishing has also brought to light the lack of tangibility of e-books. Amazon rescinded specific electronic editions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm in July 2009. Even though consumers had legally paid for the electronic books, Amazon remotely removed the books from people’s Kindle due to a problem with the source’s rights to these books. This highlights a major difference with physical books. Once people buy physical books, they have all rights to the books that cannot be taken away as Amazon did with the e-books.

As a new source for digital information, e-books also face some of the problems that came with the popularity of digital MP3 players and iPods. With the growing number of e-books, a new type of piracy comes into play with websites, such as the site RapidShare, which allow users to upload e-books to a file-hosting website. RapidShare follows a similar model of MP3 networks such as LimeWire and Napster where music is downloaded for free among users. As new media forms popularize, ways to circumvent paying for the media also develop.

The future of e-books remains unclear. Senior analyst Sarah Rotman Epps for Forrester Research believes that e-book popularity will resemble the slower business cycle of the digital camera rather than the instant revolution of the iPod. Epps suggest that the popularity of e-readers and e-books will steadily grow over the years, not instantaneously revolutionizing how people read books. Current models of the e-book industry have trends increasing over the years as the price point of e-readers lowers, content increases, and unique features become more complex.

Regardless of the future for e-books, they are at the center of a changing digital community that relies on electronic mediums. As a result, copyright legislation and digital rights management are altered in order to include e-books as part of the business market. Because this generation is so heavily influenced by the Internet, how we consume media reflects this change to electronic books and our reliance on digital mediums of media. It will be interesting to see if this reliance on digital forms overshadows people’s nostalgia for physically flipping through pages rather than mimicking the action with a simple slide of the finger.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle graduated from MIT in 1982 with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering, where he focused his studies largely on the field of Artificial Intelligence. After graduation, Kahle joined with several of his Artificial Intelligence-studying peers from MIT to create Thinking Machines, Inc. The company specialized in building supercomputers using massively parallel processing. While working at Thinking Machines, Kahle, realizing the excellent searching capability of the these supercomputers, which led to his created the WAIS project in 1988. WAIS was able to search the contents of computers and databases on the then-primitive internet for efficient retrieval. When Kahle sold the company to AOL in 1995, he embarked on two new projects at the same time: Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive. Alexa Internet, a browser toolbar which make user’s online searching for efficient – donated copies or “snapshots” of websites it took during its webcrawls to the Internet Archive project.
The archive compiles all of these snapshots of the internet to create a library of websites, allowing users to view archived versions of sites as they appeared in the past. The project, which now re-takes its snapshot of every website on the internet every two months, contains more info than 15,000 copies of Encyclopedia Britannica.
Now funded not only by Kahle and his Alexa Internet company but also Library of Congress and Compaq among others, the archive is recognized as an official library by the state of California.

While the Internet Archive may seem like little more than a trip down e-memory lane, it’s sociological implications may be more than you would assume. With the extremely fast turnover of information on the internet, a great deal of information would be completely were it not for the Internet Archive. It serves as a valuable historical resource and digital memory of sorts – preserving our past in the digital age the way traditional libraries would in the pre-internet era. With the internet now as the main source of information dissemination and business, its vastly important that we have an archive to learn from our own past.

Mozilla Firefox is the 2nd most used web browser in the world, following Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. With its extensive history with Netscape (which Nina will cover), Firefox was created after Netscape released its source code in 1994 and is now a free and open source web browser itself. Netscape’s dominance quickly faded because of its competition with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, ultimately leading to the antitrust trial United States v Microsoft. On May 1998, the United States Department of Justice and 20 US states filed against the Microsoft Corporation for Microsoft’s monopoly on personal computers and their bundles with operating systems and web browsers. United States v Microsoft centrally sought to eliminate Internet Explorer as the pre-installed web browser in PCs which compromised the business of Netscape and other internet browsers because this automatically gave PC owners Internet Explorer to use. In reaching a settlement, Microsoft was to “share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies.”

In 1998 Netscape boldly decided to release its browser suite source code for free over the internet, founded the Mozilla project, and “intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market.” The free source code not only inspired the next web browser, but other development tools and projects. Mozilla Firefox, as a open source software, connected and continues to connect an online global community that works together with the belief that the internet should benefit the public. Now, Firefox is triple licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), and the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Firefox’s logo are under trademark and copyright licenses which creates a restraint on how their source codes are to be distributed, which conflicted with the Debian Project.

It is now 5 years since Firefox’s initial release and is still popular and maintained by online communities. With thousands of add-ons, Firefox is easy to customize–maybe too easy. Instances such as the Pirates-of-the-Amazon where an add-on allows users to find free downloads of music by going to Amazon and installing ad-blocking software affects the internet business show that the future of the internet has endless possibilities.

My presentation and paper deal with the history and implications of the 2007 lawsuit Viacom filed against YouTube/Google. In February of 2007, Viacom sent YouTube over 100,000 takedown notices to which YouTube did not respond. One month later, in March of 2007, Viacom filed a 27 page complaint and suit against Google for copyright infringement through public display, public performance, inducement, contributory, and reproduction infringement, arguing that YouTube is aware of users uploading Viacom’s owned work. Additionally, Viacom says Google profits from and contributes to the infringement by their display of thumbnails as well as the streaming and hosting of the infringed content.

Viacom argues the amount of Viacom-owned unique clips on YouTube totals over 150,000, which have been viewed in total over a billion times. Viacom says there is no feasible way it has the capability to search and send take down notices for every single case of infringement, and therefore, the responsibility of policing and removing infringed material belongs to YouTube, who, Viacom says, already possesses the ability to filter other types of content for removal (like porn).

Google has since argued they are protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act section 512, which says ISPs are not liable if they meet the following requirements:

(i) must not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;

(ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of the facts or circumstance from which infringing activity is apparent; or

(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material

While this argument held water, recent discoveries made in October of this year may incriminate YouTube and effectively dismiss their use of the 512 defense. Emails have emerged between YouTube managers which allegedly acknowledge their awareness of Viacom clips hosted on their site, as well as a stated refusal to take them down. Further, there is evidence emerging which alleges that YouTube employees themselves are responsible for uploading many of Viacom’s clips. This type of evidence could be YouTube’s smoking gun and be enough to give Viacom a hefty reward.

The future implications of this case are interesting. First, like much legislature, do we think Congress anticipated this problem? That is, in 1998 was Congress considering the big media conglomerates which own hundreds of thousands of pieces of digital content easily hostable on the web? Should the 512 Safe Harbor protections be malleable to suit the instance? For example, let’s say I am the content producer of one user-generated YouTube video. The burden placed on me to find and send takedown notices to infringers is not that great, as I am searching for only one clip among all of YouTube and the internet. But should Viacom, a content producer that owns hundreds of thousands of clips, each of which can be reproduced hundreds of times, be held to the same level of responsibility? Is the burden then on these large content owners too much to bear? Is there a point at which the ISP should be held mutually responsible for ensuring infringed works do not end up on their site?

Please post your thoughts below.

Since Fred brought this article up in our last class and it pretty much deals directly with an aspect of my presentation I decided to blog about this article: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/ff_avatar_cameron/all/1

This is an absolutely awesome article about James Cameron and the future of 3-D. I highly recommend reading it, because it will give you all a very good understanding of the future of film technology as well as a great character sketch of one of the most influential directors of our time. I did not have much respect for James Cameron as a film auteur before reading this article and now I am enamoured with his wit and style. His innovational 3-D camera will change the groundwork for how we make movies and if Avatar is as big of a success as Cameron hopes it is, it could make 3-D more mainstream faster than I could have ever imagined.

In a final note, I also love the history behind James Cameron. It is a true rags to riches story, and he gets it, he knows he is lucky to be where he is and he is taking every opportunity he has to make the best of it. A true revolutionary, and filmic genius.

Greg

It is undeniable that at the present the entertainment and media industries are in a crisis. The business models utilized by the major industry moguls are no longer applicable in this present digital age. The Internet has given the consumer more control of the market than ever was imagined. Person to person file sharing has revolutionized the way we as individuals share information, but it has also thrown an enormous wrench in the economic affairs of the entertainment industries. DVD and CD sales have been steadily declining for years and both the music and film industries are now facing the question of how to update and adapt themselves to create a successful business model to survive in this digital era.

This issue of creating a business model for the digital age is particularly pertinent to me as it directly impacts my future. I am currently an aspiring independent film producer, and I will be entering into this world soon after graduation. It is of paramount importance that I take this issue of digitalization extremely seriously, because it is only becoming increasingly more difficult (economically speaking) to succeed at my craft. Fewer and fewer independent films get off the ground, as Hollywood continues to be affected by piracy and file sharing. I and others like me are the future of the film industry—we happen to also be very well versed in the intricacies of the Internet. We must utilize this awareness to be proactive and make the appropriate adjustments to quell the crisis facing our futures.

In my final paper and presentation I will set out to bring some clarity to this issue facing the film and music industries. In so doing I will examine the future of digital business models in the following three ways: first I will define the potential digital business models that exist; second I will delve into the history of digital business models within the entertainment and media scope by examining both successful and unsuccessful cases; finally I will look to the future of both the film and music industries in an attempt to come up with appropriate business plans for each—in doing so I will examine their current business strategies and how they have been unsuccessful.

Here is my slideshow, please check it out to further understand my view on the future of the entertainment industry’s business models.

The Entertainment Industry in Crisis