Copyright ethics

1. What is copyright?

Copyright is something that is granted to an individual, group of people, an organisation or company to protect its work. The protection granted can be the rights to copy, distribute and adapt woks, and anyone else that wants to use the works in this way will have to seek permission from the copyright holders.
Whenever something is created it is automatically copyrighted to the original creator.
If I were to draw a picture, or create a game, then I would automatically hold the copyright, and no one else would be able to legally copy or alter this without my permission. 
Sometimes the copyright can be passed onto another party. This is common in the music industry whereby some musicians and bands will have contracts that grant copyright control to their publishers, whilst others will retain full copyright control, and this depends on what contracts they have signed to begin with.


2. What are the three 'moral rights'?

The three 'moral rights' in copyright are:

• The right of attribution - Whoever has created the work has the right to be identified and creditied as such.Where the work is used/shown/displayed in a performance or otherwise, then it is the right of the creator to be recognised for their work.
• The right of integrity - The work is not allowed to be modified or changed in any way without the consent of the creator/copyright holder. This is to protect the creator, by only allowing the works to be shown/used in a manner that they see fit. A musician may allow a sample of their song to be used in some situations, but not others. For example, a release may be granted for a sample to be used within a commercial advertisment, but not in another song by a different artist, or vice-versa.
• False attribution - No one is allowed to use the works and make any attempt to pass it off as their own works. This protects the creator by allowing them to have the recognition deserved to them, and is to stop others from effectively 'stealing' and claiming ownership of their creative works.

3. How might copyright affect you and your work with interactive media?

Copyright is something that has to be considered carefully, especially in interactive media. This is so, because it is now so easy to source media from the internet, often without any clear identification of its copyright status. A picture or graphic that has been downloaded and used on a website that you have published may infringe on someone elses copyright, and this is why it is important to at least try and find out whether anything that you use is copyrighted, or try to contact the original author/creator/copyright owner and ask for permission. Whenever the copyright symbol is seen, there can be a misconception that it is a no-go area and the works shouldn't be touched. However, if you were to contact the author/copyright holder you may be surprised to find permission will be granted. This is all relative of course, and you may be more likely to be granted permission for 'smaller' works, or those considered a lesser value than the those from large companies or renowned individuals.

4. Do you think illegal downloading is morally right or wrong? Justify your position.

In the eyes of the law illegal downloading is certainly wrong, but on a moral level, people may have differing opinions. Personally, I think illegal downloading is morally wrong, as there has to be some way of rewarding creators for their work, and downloading for free may well be depriving them of this. That said, it is now so easy and accessable to download content for free, you could argue that is has become normal practice. In the longer term, I think that in this internet age, there needs to be a new model. Whether this would be similar to the current model of consumer payment, or whether things should move to a more 'paid-for-by-advertising' based model I don't know, but it would seem likely that somehow the model needs to change to suit the technology/culture.

5. What does Creative Commons do?

Creative Commons is like an intermediary of copyright. It allows creators to be more specific about the ways in which their works can, or can't be used. It effectivelty allows creators to make their own rules when it comes to use of their works. For example, a license could be granted that would allow anyone to modify their works as they see fit, but that they must attribute the original creator. Or, they may be allowed to modify works, which once modified, can be attributed to the person who has made the change, without attributing the original creator. Licenses can also be granted that allow for the commercial or non-commercial use or works, and also the country or countires which it applies to.


6. Use an image from Creative Commons in your blog correctly

I have attached a photograph that was hosted on flickr.com, courtesy of MarcX Photography.

The photographer has licensed it with some rights reserved, under these conditions:

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.  

Photo by MarcX Photography - www.marcxphotography.net

7. Give your opinion on the way that total freedom from copyright might affect our culture

If their were no copyright laws I can see two scenarios.
The first being that if their were no copyright laws then anyone could alter anything in any way that they wished. This would have an effect on creativity, as you may find more uses of existing works in lots of ways that you may have never thought possible. This could have a positive effect in that it would benefit people without placing restrictions on what they could do with existing material, and you could end up with lots of good outcomes. Good music, artwork, products etc. Things could progress quicker as people could use/share ideas in whatever way they wanted. On the negative side, you could end up with lots of poor products/material, as people could just 'have a go', possibly without excersising any expertise or knowledge.
Secondly, by having copyright laws, we are protecting creators of works, but at the same time, placing restrictions on its use. This could stifle creativity as some people who may like to experiement with or derive further works may not be allowed to do so. As an example, someone could remix a song in such a way that has never been heard before, and may seem ahead of its time, but to release this commercially would only be possible if granted consent by the copyright holder.

Chris

Original GTA design docs..

An interesting find.. one of the original programmers has posted scans of the original GTA docs from way back in '95, with a working title of 'Race 'n Chase'.

www.flickr.com/photos/mikedailly/5548280212/

First steps with Android development...

I've been wanting to experiment with mobile phone development for some time, so i began by researching what tools were available for Android development.
I came across the Airplay SDK by Ideaworks Labs, http://www.airplaysdk.com/
This looked ideal as it a cross-platform SDK which can target multiple platforms such as iPhone/Android/Handheld consoles etc., and it is also based on C++ which i am familiar with.
So, the first thing was to download and install the SDK, integrating with the Visual Studio IDE. This went surprisingly smoothly with no hassles! Now time to get something built!
I started by loading one of the example projects included with the SDK. The example was just a test of basic initialisation and display of an image to screen. I always try to get a sample project up and running as a kind of confidence test. Once I know that the whole build cycle from compilation, build and run are ok then I can get started for proper.
The example code was fine, no probs running in the Android emulator. Now time to get it on a real phone! Luckily there were no signing issues for deployment on Android, so the process was pretty much pain free! Just change build options from x86 (win emulation) to ARM code. That produced an apk file which I could then transfer and install on my phone. Couldn't have gone more smoother!
Now that the test is all complete, I can start tinkering around with the SDK with some sort of aim now...

NRS, research, plus a little Star Wars

The National Readership Survey is a non-profit making organisation that provides statistical and analytical research data based on the readerhip of the UK's major print-based media.
It aims to provide details about which groups of people read certain papers and magazines with the aim of breaking those statistics down into a social grading structure.

The way in which NRS captures this data is by interview with a large sample of 36,000 adults aged 15+.
These are conducted year on year to ensure that the data is kept current and upto date.
This also has benefits in that the data can be compared year to year to determine any trend changes in readership audiences.

This data is used by advertisers in order to target their products to a particular audience.
The way the NRS breaks down this audience is by a social grading scale.

The classifications are as follows:

A Higher managerial, administrative and professional
B Intermediate managerial, administrative and professional
C1 Supervisory, clerical and junior managerial, administrative and professional
C2 Skilled manual workers
D Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers
E State pensioners, casual and lowest grade workers, unemployed with state benefits only

Advertisers make great use of this grading structure in order to target their campaigns to the right demographic. As a an example, an advertising print run for a renowned and expensive brand of watches will likely be better placed in a fashionable life-style magazine than a 'lads mag'. The evidence for this would be that the higher social class are likely to have more money to spend on what might be seemed as luxuries and as such are more likely to buy magazines about such 'life-style' things than a 'lads mag' that is more commonly associated with the lower social classes.

Similarly in television advertising, adverts may be placed during certain programmes according to the social class of the viewership that they are most likely to attract.

Companies also use what's called Quantitative, and Qualitative research in order to try and market their products successfully. This is in terms of by creating both the right product for the right audience. There is little point in spending a large budget on a product launch which no-ones buys or is interested in. This stresses the importance of market research.
Quantitative research can be described as collecting and anaylysing numerical, statistical based data. For example a poll or survey could be conducted as to whether the public (taken from a random sample of a 1000 respondents) would prefer to see a romantic comedy film or a science-fiction film. From these results you may get a swing to a certain preference which could help in deciding what may be the more successful film to proceed with. However, this only provides a limited picture, but with Qualitative research we could gain some more insight into these results. For example, as well as just asking what film they would prefer, we could ask them what things they would like to see in a film, or organise focus groups in which ideas for a new film are suggested, with feedback encouraged and recorded from those taking part.

One of the reasons that Star Wars has been so successful is that it's underlining story has universal appeal, in that it deals with a blend of mythology, science-fiction, the morality of good vs evil, and the classic 'hero's journey'. These are ideals that tend to have mass appeal, regardless of cultural, geographical, even religious boundaries.

Adjustment Bureau design drafts...

Here is a couple of design drafts of my layout for the Adjustment Bureau website.

The first idea has a more militaristic, darker feel. I felt the colour were too bland and wanted something with a brighter feel to it.

Hence, the second look...  which has since evolved into the final design with the borders in place.

Adjustment Bureau Sitemap

Here is my draft site-map for the Adjustment Bureau web-site that I'm working on.
Used to keep a visual idea of what needs to be done.

Experimenting with actionscript - Website Project

I have decided to pick 'The Adjustment Bureau' as a website project, and as part of getting some ideas together I have been tinkering with actionscript to test out a few of those ideas.
One of them being a camera/surveillance type effect, with crackling/rolling scan lines.
So what I have done is have two pictures, one being the actual image i want the effect on, and the other is a image of scan-lines or you could have a load of tv snow, fuzz, whatever. Scan-lines seem to work good for this though.
Then its just a matter of overlaying the scan image ontop of the original and mucking about with the alpha settings and in my case, i am also changing the y scale and height placement of the image. I do this in a loop and every change is randomized to some extent so that it looks as real as possible without looking like a simple repeated pattern.
The .swf is here if you want to have a look..
http://www.internalimage.co.uk/screen-fuzz.swf

Here is the code: There are two alternates in there, the first being whether or not to do the fuzzy effect, and the other decides whether to do a 'sliding down screen' effect or just a random anywhere one..


var vAlpha = 100;
var vScale = 0;
var bScroll = 0;
var bRotate = 0;
var startTime:Number;
var waitTime:Number;
var doFuzz = false;


startTime = getTimer();
waitTime =  Math.ceil(Math.random()*1000);


onEnterFrame = function() {


//toggle between doing fuzz and not to give more randomness
if( (getTimer() - startTime) > waitTime)
{
if(doFuzz == false) doFuzz = true; //switch flags
else{
doFuzz = false;
picfuzz._alpha = 0; //hide the fuzz!
cctvpic._alpha = 100; //full show on pic
}
startTime = getTimer(); //reset timer
waitTime =  Math.ceil(Math.random()*10000) + 1; //set a new random time delay
if(doFuzz == true) waitTime = waitTime / 2;
}

if(doFuzz == true)
{
// picfuzz._y += 1;
bScroll = Math.ceil(Math.random()*25);
if(bScroll <= 10)
{

picfuzz._y = cctvpic._y + Math.ceil(Math.random()* cctvpic._height-40);
picfuzz._yscale = Math.ceil(Math.random()*60);

picfuzz._alpha = Math.ceil(Math.random()*35);
// cctvpic._alpha += 1; //Math.ceil(Math.random()*25);
}
else
{
picfuzz._y += 1; //cctvpic._y + Math.ceil(Math.random()* cctvpic._height-50);
picfuzz._yscale += 1;// = Math.ceil(Math.random()*40);

picfuzz._alpha += 1; //Math.ceil(Math.random()*25);

cctvpic._alpha = Math.ceil(Math.random()*25) + 75;
}

}
}

Basic game movement in flash actionscript a la PacMan!

Hi,

grid based movement using arrays

Been playing around in actionscript. Got multi-dimensional arrays working so that means I can define a maze level in this array and have the code traverse this and display the relevant blocks of the maze (in this case its just either a wall or nothing).
Using the same array I am able to move the player about and detect if there is a wall in the way and block the movement.
The green and red are done in the same way, except for the their movement, it is simply a random number between 1-4 which determines which way they will try to move (1=left, 2=right, 3=up, 4=down).

a code snippet

It's a basic example of using arrays to track movement and collisions. Think Pac-Man!
You could for instance have sections of the grid that are power-ups/keys etc. which when you move over them change something. You just check which position you are on the grid, look into the array at this position and get what's there.

chris

Magic Pen - a flash game review

Starts easy enough..

Magic Pen, what is it? Well, it’s a little hard to describe without playing it first, but here goes…

We’ve all heard of these physics games which are quite popular especially on the indie and casual games circuit, except this one has a neat little twist. The object of the game is to solve the puzzle, and what is the puzzle you might ask? To solve each level you simply have to get the red ball into the flag area. So how do you do that then I hear you ask? Well this is where it gets interesting because in order to do that, you need to construct various shapes, ramps, levels and pulley systems in order to get the ball moving! You draw out all these shapes with the ‘Magic Pen’ of the title, and it couldn’t be easier. Want a circle? Draw one and there it is…  A square? Four lines, done..  Triangle? Go ahead!

That’s the easy part done, the harder (and fun!) part is how you get these shapes to interact with each other!

The first few levels are quite easy and this serves well to familiarise yourself with some of the basics of the game. Build a couple of ramps here and there, a nicely placed rock with a make-shift pulley system and then draw a big rock in mid air which will then drop nicely onto the pulley and thus catapult the ball into the finish area (or no-where land if you’ve over done it just slightly!).

As the levels progress it gets slightly harder and you have to start thinking up ingenious ways of attaching shapes together with pins or hinges and you can end up with some very precarious looking constructions…  one false move and everything comes crashing down!

The difficulty level is set fairly well so it manages to keep your interest without getting too hard or frustrating (and this it will do!)

It’s definitely one of those games that gets you thinking as well as being fun. And once you get to those hard levels, the re-play factor is there as you just want to keep trying to solve the level!

It also a good example of what can be done in Flash too as it is obviously dealing with some quite complex physics maths and rendering in there.

Try the game out for yourself here: http://www.bubblebox.com/play/puzzle/975.htm
Or watch a video clip:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g7rbZ4OMU8

Mock-up home-page for Dues Ex, plus some cool links!

My mock-up using original material

So we've had to do a mock-up for a website of our choosing.
I decided to use Deus Ex - Human Revolution as mine. A hotly anticipated release for this year.

The original Deus Ex was developed by ION Storm and released in 2000. It was an outstanding and critically acclaimed game at its release and can still compete with todays games, albeit with poorer gfx obviously. A highly immersive game in my opinion whereby you can choose to play the game in many different ways.

Original Deus Ex cover art

Warren Spector of then ION Storm gives a post-mortem on the game's production in this article here: Deus Ex post-mortem.

Indeed, you could say it's quite suprising the game ever got made considering what was going on with the development of Daikatana, headed up by John Romero of id fame, and thankfully, being developed at another branch of ION Storm. That game, on the contrary, is cited as one of the industry's biggest commercial failures.
Read the story here Daikatana dream.

Both articles are a good read if you're into game development.

That's my 2 credits worth! Chow,
chris

Understanding principles of digital video technology in interactive media

Introduction
Outline what the essay is about and what is going to be discussed.

In this essay I am going to discuss how digital video technology is being used to enhance the user’s interactive experience.

YouTube is a video-sharing website that enables anyone to upload their own videos to be viewed and shared by other users and in just the last few years has had a tremendous impact on how we consume digital video and also a greater variety of content is now being produced and watched.

User-generated content is a rising media trend nowadays. With the technology and tools now available it is possible for almost anyone with just a basic knowledge of computers to be able to create their own video content and share it with a potential audience of millions. The existence of sites such as YouTube, are partly responsible for this now massive audience. As reported on http://mashable.com/2010/12/22/youtube-700-billion-video/ “YouTube has announced that its users have uploaded more than 13 million hours of video content to its servers in the last 12 months, resulting in more than 700 billion YouTube video views.”

This is especially apparent in terms of user-generated ‘Citizen journalism’, whereas before you were quite limited in how you could get your content out to a public audience (even not at all), being mostly the preserve of media outlets, corporations and companies, now it is possible for anyone to upload their own video, sometimes showing what is being censored from their own governments or that the mainstream media will not report. Sometimes it is simply a case of catching something on film that has been missed, the phrase ‘being in the right place at the right time’, comes to mind.
One example of this is in the case of Ian Tomlinson, who died at the London G20 protest. A member of the public had caught some footage of Ian Tomlinson prior to his death, which revealed that he had been pushed over by police. This video footage was picked up by The Guardian newspaper who publicised it and released it into the public domain. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2009/apr/07/g20-police-assault-video?INTCMP=SRCH. The footage remains on YouTube in various forms and is still today generating strong debate.
User-generated content is seen as one of the media and entertainment industries' biggest threats, according to a survey by Accenture http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4534, which goes on to state, “More than half (57 percent) of the respondents identified the rapid growth of user-generated content — which includes amateur digital videos, podcasts, mobile phone photography, wikis and social-media blogs — as one of the top three challenges they face today. In addition, more than two-thirds (70 percent) of respondents said they believe that social media, one of the largest segments of user-generated content, will continue to grow, compared with only 3 percent of respondents who said they view social media as a fad.”

If people are consuming more and more user-generated content, then this could have implications for commercial content providers, as the survey goes on to state “And while two-thirds are positive their organizations will find ways of making money out of user-generated content within three years, just under a quarter said they have no idea how this will be accomplished.”. In the same article, Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP Group, is quoted as saying, "The winners will be those who can probe and analyze the changes, and manage and merge online and offline most successfully,"
http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4534

As well as individuals, many corporate companies and organisations use the site as a means of promotion, by releasing short video clips relevant to what they want to advertise or promote, potentially reaching a more targeted audience.
Coca-Cola used this video sharing and social media to great effect with their ‘Happiness Machine’ concept. They installed a rigged Coca-Cola vending machine into various locations which dispensed free Cokes, food and games. The machine was a novel award-winning advertising tool, with the students and workers surprise and excitement being captured on film. This was later posted onto social media sites such as YouTube where it gained popularity through sharing and social networking and are often referred to as ‘viral videos’.
http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/presscenter/nr_20100527_happiness_machine_clio.html
“The much-anticipated sequel to the global internet sensation -- the Coca-Cola Happiness Machine is now here, spreading happiness to the UK. With over one million views in the first week alone, the winner of CLIO's prestigious Gold Interactive Award and with a prime-time spot in the American Idol ad break, the film truly captured the world's imagination earlier this year and made people ask "Where will happiness strike next?"

With the use of social networking and Web 2.0 it is now possible to create your own targeted information that match your interests. http://social.dailyblogworld.com/2010/08/cascaad-tailored-social-streams-that.html, ‘Cascaad – Tailored Social Streams that Match Your Interest’

The ability to record digital video is now possible on such small devices as mobile phones and portable video recorders.
http://mobileactive.org/how-record-quality-video-your-mobile ‘Mobile Media: How To Record Quality Video on Your Mobile’

Usually this type of video can be quite highly compressed, resulting in a smaller file size at the expense of video quality. This would not be such an issue for applications such as news reporting as the essential use of this video technology is to broadcast the message, so the content of the video is important but it needn’t have to be the best quality.

On the technical side of things, YouTube stores its uploaded videos in a file format known as Flash Video (FLV) which contains the encoded video. These files are considerably smaller than some other file formats, making them ideal for live streaming and downloading over the internet.
Videos can be uploaded in a multitude of formats such as AVI, WMV, MOV, MP4, 3GP, and more. Once uploaded, they are converted into the FLV format before going live.
This makes uploading video content a fairly straightforward process that involves just a few clicks, during which you will be prompted to select a file from your computer, wait while it uploads and then after YouTube has processed the video it will be available to share as you see fit.
Digital video is a recording format that uses a digital signal to process the motion video captured by a digital video recorder. Most modern-day recording equipment such as professional broadcast cameras, hand-held camcorders, stills cameras, as well as the editing suite used in post-production is based on the digital format.
This digital format, in very simplistic terms, is based on a binary format of ones (1) and zeros (0), which are stored as a continuous stream of data. It is the way that this stream of data is processed which turns it from being just that, data, to a video picture that is displayed on screen, television.
When video is recorded it is ‘encoded’ to the storage medium, usually a hard-drive or solid-state disk. This encoding process converts the video as it’s captured and stores it in a digital format, and when it is played back it is ‘decoded’ in order to be output to screen. This video data can be copied, moved, re-arranged, cut, pasted and edited digitally with far more ease using software tools.
Digital video can also be subject to various types of compression. Compression is a method of data processing that aims to reduce the storage size required for a set of data (for example, a video file) by using mathematical algorithms to reorganise the data. Decompression is the opposite of this process, reverting the data to its original and uncompressed state.
Compression methods vary from the simple to the complex. As an example, a simple method could be that of reducing a section of duplicate frames in a video file (a lengthy still shot perhaps) to just one frame, and set the amount of time this frame should be shown for before moving on. A much more complex method could be that of analysing different frame sections and marking sections of the frame that do not change, deleting these duplicate sections whilst only keeping the actual changes between frames. This type of compression that removes data that is deemed unnecessary or redundant can be referred to as a ‘lossy’ compression technique, and ‘non-lossy’ compression being a technique that can shrink the data whilst not having to permanently remove any of it.
The distinction between encoding and compression is not always apparent. Compression is sometimes referred to as encoding and vice-versa, or it may be implied that compression is simply part of the encoding process, and although often true, they can be entirely separate processes performed independently of each-other.

American Gothic in Winter Photoshop Mash-up

Been playing in Photoshop. The idea was to take a painting and 'winter it up'.

I took the American Gothic painting by Grant Wood.

So by using layers and adding hats, snow and then blurring these with a bit of noise here and there I have come up with this: