The first topic that made me think of today is copyright. John mentioned the current (2004) climate of copyright issues, and some are far off yet some remain true today. 11 years ago, media piracy was relatively new topic in terms of the internet. P2P software like Limewire dominated the scene, and millions of files were transfered daily. Losing money, labels fought hard to shut down services like these, and to increase the penalty for offenders. Still, the piracy battle grew larger and larger as more people used these file sharing services. Limewire was shut down, but newer, faster services like The Pirate Bay came to use. Since then, most labels have tried to take a different approach, and the music and art industry have changed because of piracy. Artists now make little money off of producing music, instead making most of their money from live shows and promotions. Many smaller artists have adopted the business model of giving out their art for free and hoping for a donation in return. This has been shown to work many times, though it does sound counter- intuitive. So, in short, copyright issues are far from over, and the market has been changing since the beginning.

John also spoke about plagiarism in the academic setting. Sites like TurnItIn existed at the time of the video, and we still use them extensively today. John argued that these sites are fundamentally unnecessary, since they completely ignore the usefulness of the internet as a supportive source. Something that strikes me even more as an issue today in the academic setting is using code from the internet for a programming assignment. The equivalent service for computer science plagiarism, MOSS, is supposed to pick up on code similarities between students and from the internet. I think a question that remains today, in this age of open source coding and Stack Overflow, is where do you draw the line between using blocks of code off the internet and citing it, and labeling it as plagiarism? Different professors have different policies on this. On one hand, copying and pasting code is one way not to learn the material, yet on the other hand, the real world encourages using any code available as a tool for programming. The lines are still blurred in this issue, and I think it will be interesting to see where the academic integrity standard goes with this in the future.