The Internet and Social Issues in Computer Science

The internet is a network consisting of networks of computers. Just a portion of the internet looks something like this. The topology is something we might call an "extended star" topology, with nodes in one star portion communicating with others in other portions.

Every computer on the internet is given an IP address, where IP stands for Internet Protocol. An IP address is a 32-bit number broken into 4 8-bit sections. A sample IP address might be 24.52.224.13. Traffic is routed from one place on the internet to another by (for the most part) routers. A router learns which way to transmit a piece of information to get it to its destination in the least time possible.

For much of the history of the Internet data has been stored on servers - dedicated computers sitting in a datacenter somewhere with a large amount of disk space and fast network connections. This is still very much the case - when you hear someone talking about "the cloud," they're really talking about some group of servers somewhere which contains their data.

What's much more interesting though is the idea of distributing data across the internet, not in centralized servers. It has turned out that piracy of music, software, and other media has been the main users of these distributed protocols.

The first place this made a major impact was Napster. Napster was not entirely distributed though - it had a centralized server which contained a listing of all of the music available on its network and where it could be found. The idea was that a person would connect to Napsters server, look at the list, and request the file from whoever had it. Of course, it was easy for a suit to be brought against Napster for them to take down their centralized server, effectively killing the service.

Kazaa and Bit Torrent (developed here at UB!) are the second generation of peer-to-peer systems, and are still largely in use in the underground piracy scene. These services are decentralized. Peers manage to find each other through the use of a tracker which keeps track of which users are currently using the torrent.

Part of the reason that piracy is an issue is that the government has become more willing to grant protections to copyright owners. Works could be copyrighted for 95 years from the time of publication of the work if the work was published between 1923 and 1977. Copyrights prior to 1923 have expired and are in the public domain. Now if a work is copyrighted, it is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation (whichevers shorter).

Copyrights seem to get longer just about the time important works are about to become public domain - this is no accident. Content owners would like to continue profiting off a work, ideally forever.

The problem with this is that if a work goes out of print no new copies can be made. A content owner can still charge whatever price they want for something nearly a hundred years later, even though there's no author or maybe even family to benefit from the sale of their works. It's also not legal to create derivatives of a copyrighted work without permission.

That said, who's to say that someone shouldn't be profitting? It's a very controversial issue which you should put some independant thought in to.

In some industries (such as video games) after a certain time copyright owners will release their software for free to the public domain themselves. This keeps their work alive after they've finished profiting off it.

The open source movement, as it was applied to software first in 1983 by Richard Stallman (of the GNU project) was created to give freedom to software users. The idea is that software should be completely free and should be able to be modified and redistributed by anyone at any time. Stallman often says that he means "free as in freedom, not free as in free beer." This means it's not about the giving away of the software, but about the freedom to do what you like with it.

This movement has now come to other media as well though. It's easy to find open source textbooks online, images licensed under Creative Commons, and other media. There's a push by some content creaters to make their works freely available (of course they still can profit themselves by selling their work as well, and many do). This is directly at odds with how copyright law has been structured, so who's right?