Before You Look Elsewhere, Look at Yourself

Aram Sinnreich and Jupiter Communication's research regarding DRM was interetsing because it highlights the fact that though media corporations are quick to levy infractions against people they view as infingers of their IP online, they do very little to protect their IP. If a mother allowed her child to run into the street and her child was hit by a car, we'd consider her negligence of her child to cause her to have to carry some of the blame in the situation yet do we every ask, why aren't more corporations water-marking their IP? Labels are angry that music is downloaded illegally yet they do very little to stop it from leaking. The tables from the study even showed that corporations were more likely to coerce people than actually do anything to prevent the infringing they are going after. It's certainly a frustrating situation! One thing that came to mind while thinking about all of this was ITunes and its m4p files. M4p's give users a license that provides a set number of transfers of the file. In this way everyone is on the same page about what is legal and what isn't with the downloaded file in question. I think if this type of order were more present, perhaps IP would be less murky territory.