The Use of Computers in Entertainment :: Technology

The Use of Computers in Entertainment In today’s electronic era computers have a hand in almost everything. Entertainment is no exception, in fact with the coming of digital information has made one of its greatest leaps. Movies, games, music, even books that that are simple and easy as it is have been impacted greatly by computers. But how far is too far? Music is now stolen, movies the same, games can be hacked and broken into with simple programs. As technology continues, more and more information will be taken, changed, stolen, and laws will then be made to try to stop all of this. But all they really need is a good middle ground to work towards or land on. With the coming of DVD’s computers moved into a big portion of the video industry. But with it came the ability to take a movie off of the disk and distribute it over user sharing programs. Many companies have tried to solve this problem by adding programs and such to the disks so that the information cannot be stolen. This does not stop DVD pirating, but it does cut down on the burning of DVDs. CD’s have also incorporated this type of programming for the same reasons. The music industry was turned upside down with the coming of Napster. Why this was is not really understood, because many programs that were out previously that did the same thing. Scour was a one of a kind program, and before that simple FTP sites were in abundance, as they still are, to download music. Perhaps the ease of which Napster allowed users to share information is what bothered them. But a lawsuit was taken against Napster, and it had to restrict many of its features (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1000463.stm). But if they had simply come to a common middle ground, perhaps having users pay to use the service or pay for the music itself, would have been better. Just because Napster was forced to add program lines that all but shut the program down didn’t mean the other user to user programs were forced to stop being made. In fact when one is shut down it seems like 5 replace it. Because of this many programs that have a service fee or a membership of so me sort is ignored.