How Do We Prevent Sharing Music Illegally?

After our class discussion, I began thinking on how to solve the problem of illegal music sharing. I know that many of my friends are victims of illegal music downloading and sharing. Over the weekend I came up with three ideas on how to possibly solve this problem. Let me know what you think!

1. Sharing should be blocked on websites that currently allow it. It sounds easy, but it is not. For example, websites such as YouTube should block sharing by creating a code or a system where you have to pay to download the song. This would help YouTube and the artist make money and would also create less of a chance of piracy. I know that people would still get around this system, but people are going to find ways around everything.

2. Most people do not want to click more than three times to get what they want; moreover, why not create a system where it is just difficult to download illegally? Make downloading possible only by clicking four or more times, so it defers illegal downloading. If it is hard for someone to do, then they may give up and try to find the song somewhere else that is easier. This would definitely cause people to stop downloading due to frustration.

3. Increase advertisements on why you should buy music versus trying to download illegally. This would cause a guilty conscious in some people and help decrease the amounts of illegal downloads. Some people may think that iTunes or the record label gets a big percentage of the sales, so helping explain why people should buy the music may be a possible solution to the problem.

These are very basic ideas, but starting simple is normally key to solving any problem. I think that if we start by taking these steps, then we an create a dent in the illegal downloading problem.

Privacy

Privacy-Enhanced Personalization by Alfred Kobsa brought up many important issues about privacy on the internet. I think it is important to know what the internet knows about you, but it may also scare you. The internet knows a lot about you whether you want it to or not. It stores a lot of information that you put on websites. Internet users understand that these websites know a lot about them, but it is something that every internet user is aware of when giving information out.

Looking at the three groups of internet users on page 26, I am included in the "privacy unconcerned" group. I am concerned with how much the internet knows about me, but I am not unwilling to provide my information if I want something.  I think it would be interesting to know how much each internet site knows about me, but then again I am not sure if I would really want to know how much they know because they probably have more information than I want them to have. I do not have a problem with releasing information about my basic demographics, hobbies, personal tastes, lifestyle information, or internet behaviors. However, I am less likely to give a site my credit card information and I will only give my social security code if it is something very important and I cannot move on to the next step without giving it. 

One question I have after reading this article is based on the "pseudonymous users and user models" section on page 31; moreover, do you think it is possible to create an anonymous infrastructure that still supports personalization? It would be awesome if this were possible because I do not like giving my e-mail to websites based on the fact that I do not like junk mail. If this were possible it would definitely be something for our generation to take a deeper look at.