DRM Portfolio

Criteria A: Presentation of the issue

DRM which is Digital Rights Management is becoming a huge issue, and all companies are trying to use it so that music won’t be downloaded for free. Amazon launched its music download service last September, and now offers 2.9 million songs without copy protection from Warner, EMI, and Universal (as well as from 33,000 independent record labels). The three formats are MP3 and AAC, which are both open formats, and WMA, a proprietary format owned by Microsoft which dominates the market for online music sales, leaving some consumers confused about what will play where. Now, with the locks off Warner's music, the MP3 format gets a boost--and music downloading moves one step closer to being entirely DRM-free. Industry executives hope that initiatives such as iTunes Plus and Amazon MP3--which omit the DRM locks placed on audio files by an earlier generation of music services--will encourage consumers to buy more music. Warner believes that giving consumers the assurance that the music they buy can play on any device will spur sales, it may also prompt buyers to look at other digital music player brands, ending Apple's dominance of that market segment. (Sayer, 2008) The main issue here is that if they don’t find a way to use DRM then it will be chaos everyone will be downloading for free which mean violating certain people’s rights and sooner or later these people will stop showing and being able to show their talents and creativity.

Criteria B: The IT background of the issue

The developments that have enabled Digital Rights Management to occur are piracy, development of technology, and supply and demand. The technology works by people from the entertainment business having a Digital Rights Management which is exactly what is happening currently with iTunes, when you purchase a movie from there you’re not allowed to share it with anyone. All of the people from the entertainment business have to be aware and put DRM’s on their music, or movies. As for peer to peer software’s like limewire, they have to be abolished because if not then people will be bound to download stuff illegally. If this continues then there won’t be control on the money that the people from the entertainment business are making and sooner or later they will be out of business.

Criteria C: The impact of the issue

The stakeholders in the DRM would be the people who invest in it, therefore other companies that are investors in DRM. This is going to have an impact in society, also known as a social impact. This includes ethical issues, policies and standards, intellectual property, and control. The DRM issue is one that is both frustrating and confusing. James Frankel has published a number of his thoughts about this subject on his website: Music Technology in Education. In his latest article: Copyright or Copywrong III he brings up many good points and considerations about using DRM in the classroom and states that using a cracked DRM file in class, even if you own it, is illegal. [DRM] Any technology used to protect the interests of owners of content and services (such as copyright owners). Typically, authorized recipients or users must acquire a license in order to consume the protected material—files, music, movies—according to the rights or business rules set by the content owner.(The definition of DRM is from Google. Information about this tool) (Frankel, 2008).

Criteria D: Solutions to problems arising from the issue

“DRM is not where it should be, but you won’t get me to say that there should be usage models and different payment models for usage. At the end of the day, incentive systems do make a difference, but we don’t have it right with incentives or interoperability.” (Gates, 2006). The German company Akuma is letting their customers download music without DRM. The MP3 files contain a small high-pitched "watermark" that identifies the song's purchaser. This allows people to play the song on any device they want without restrictions, and allows law-enforcement to catch anyone who shares songs on file-sharing P2P networks. I think the idea is brilliant where the best of both worlds can comfortably collide, giving everyone what they want. The question I have still is how easy would it be to remove the "watermark" from the song? What about converting it to another format? Will this loose the track's "watermark" or not? It may not be the perfect solution, but then again it may be (Carter, 2006)

Criteria E: Selection and use of sources

(Carter, 2006)
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/09/18/the-drm-problem-solved/

(Frankel, 2008)
http://mustech.net/2007/02/25/drm-and-copyright-legalities-and-ethics

(Gates, 2006)
http://www.overclock.net/software-news/139834-bill-gates-opposes-drm.html

(Sayer, 2008)
http://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/InfoWeb?p_action=doc&p_docid=11F436E79F69C368&p_docnum=1&s_doc_type=doc&p_queryname=800&p_product=SLCT&p_theme=newcat&p_nbid=E64U5ANXMTIzNDQyNzQ1My44NzYyNjg6MTo1OnFhdGFy

Criteria A: Presentation of the issue

DRM which is Digital Rights Management is becoming a huge issue, and all companies are trying to use it so that music won’t be downloaded for free. Amazon launched its music download service last September, and now offers 2.9 million songs without copy protection from Warner, EMI, and Universal (as well as from 33,000 independent record labels). The three formats are MP3 and AAC, which are both open formats, and WMA, a proprietary format owned by Microsoft which dominates the market for online music sales, leaving some consumers confused about what will play where. Now, with the locks off Warner's music, the MP3 format gets a boost--and music downloading moves one step closer to being entirely DRM-free.

Criteria E

Geer, David. Security Technologies: Go Phishing. Technologuy News. June 2005. 20th Nov. 2008 .

Herley, Cormac, and Dinei Flor ˆencio. A Profitless Endeavor: Phishing as Tragedy of the. Research.microsoft.com. Oct. 2006. Microsoft. 25 Oct. 2008 .

Ramzan, Zulfikar, and Candid W¨uest. Phishing Attacks: Analyzing Trends in 2006. Ceas. Summer 2006. 13 Oct. 2008 .

Tsow, Alex, and Markus Jakobsson. Deceit and Deception: A Large User Study of Phishing. Deceit and Deception: A Large User Study of Phishing. 25 Jan. 2005. 6th Nov. 2008 .

Criteria D

Criterion D- A solution to the problem

There are many feasible solutions for the case of fraudulent attacks or phishing. The easiest way to reduce the number of phishing attacks on people and companies would be to have a Program like Norton Anti-virus or kapersky to check websites and their reliability before going into any of them.

Anti virus programs like kapersky which are also excellent at detecting dangerous sites and possible phishing attacks work by scanning a website, like a document and using other templates of fake websites, know which website is fraudulent and which is not. They can also scan document and emails by the same way. This way before anyone downloads a document, they could have it scanned to know if it contains a virus that could extract their personal information from the computer and send it to a scammer.

The advantages of this solution over others are that, the cost of acquiring it isn’t much. They can also detect and eliminate over 95% of all virus and phishing threats. They have one inconvenient disadvantage though and this is the tendency for them to update every month or even less and this tends to take hours to complete. The computer may sometimes be useless while the files are being updated.

Criteria C

I apoligize for posting this section late, but i had a problem with the internet therefore was not able to do it at home.



Phishing is an e-mail fraud scam conducted for the purposes of information or identity theft. Credit card companies like Visa and also banks like the Bank of America would be interested in phishing and how it could be stopped or minimized because phishing could ruin their company. Phishing could have a lot of impacts on people’s life. It could leave them broke, with no money. Some people might even fall sick as a result of being scammed because their only savings might have being scammed from them. Phishing could also have a reasonable impact on people’s ethics like their responsibility, accountability for instance. Phishing victims might not be trusted by their employer or even their friends. Their respectability and dignity might also be affected. People won’t trust them because they would think that they are thieves. According to a research by David Geer called “security Technologies, Go phishing, “For the 12 months ending April 2004, said analyst Avivah Litan with Gartner Inc., a market research firm, “there were 1.8 million phishing attack victims, and the fraud incurred by phishing victims totaled $1.2 billion.”. We can see that there are a lot of phishing scams per year and the cost incurred are a lot. Geer explains the steps being taken to reduce phishing and also the impact of phishing on individuals as I’ve stated. Phishing scammers are now moving from people to companies. Although phishers have only hit a small percentage of financial institutions (150 of 9,000 in the US in 2004) but the number keeps rising every year. Phishers are attacking industries like such as e-commerce,

Link to article:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1439447&isnumber=31000

Criteria B

The IT system of my article is basically the creation of web pages. Web Pages are made through HTML coding. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. A web page is made up of many HTML coding. The HTML file is a text file that has small Markup tags that tell the web browser how to display the page (w3schools, 2008). My IT system works by first of all a person making a web page, then he puts it up on the server, therefore whenever anyone gets on to the internet, goes to a browser and finds the fake website he/she might think it is real. The components are webpage program, uploaded server, interconnected server, and browser software. The instructions and rules of how the information travels into the internet is HTTP. This is Hyper Text Transfer Protocol .

Criteria A

My article is called Bank turmoil fuels phishing boom. My article is about phishing. Phishing is a form of fraud, it is when someone steals the financial and health identities of a certain person to gain the same advantages and privileges. My article is linked with business because it talks about how banks are at risk and it links with the web because phishing usually happens on the internet. The issue in my article is phishing which at the moment does not have a solution. My IT system is the internet.