Immacomputer, stop all the downloadin'
We live in a privileged age. Thanks to the Internet, the
cost of being a full—time student has lessened slightly,
and considering the local economy and costs of living,
that's certainly a blessing.
Infographic originally created and posted by Westwood College (tinyurl.com/college-budget) — citing research into student spending, labour and a poll of students from over 100 campuses across the United States in 2006 — illustrates fairly well where a student spends their money.
There are two interesting omissions on the report, however, in that it doesn't account for how much your average student spends on alcohol (although it may account for the reason the 'Discretionary' element clocks in at a whopping 40 per cent of the overall figure), and how much is spent on 'downloadables' ... music, movies, e—books, video games and more.
The truth is, thanks to the Internet and that one famous levy on recordable media here in Canada all those years ago, Canadians have long since accepted downloading music, television shows and even textbooks as a part of everyday life. The misconception has always been that downloading the media is all right as long as its not uploaded again in turn, but that is incorrect.
The private copying levy, introduced as a part of the Canadian Copyright Act in 1997, mandated that a sum of money be charged on recordable media in addition to sales taxes to then be paid to private recipients to offset their losses due to private copying. Simply put, if you download music or other media and then burn it to a CD or DVD for your own personal use, you have legally engaged the governing bodies of those media and upheld the law.
While the levy was heralded as a victory upon its introduction, time has gone to show its indirect enabling of downloading amongst users here in Canada. When you think about it, the biggest threat in 1997 was the writeable CD-R drive in new computers and the newfound ability to make instant copies of commercial CDs. Although MP3 technology was finalized and made the industry standard in the early 1990s, Napster wouldn't usher in the file sharing era until 1999 — but when it did, the private copying levy created just enough grey area for Canadians to download all manner of media to their heart's content.
Now, nearly 15 years later, people can download almost everything but clothes. Torrent aggregators like scrapetorrent.com and isohunt.com (the latter of which is celebrating its eighth birthday) allow you to search torrent servers all at once, and programs like Calibre can be used to convert text in any format into a file ready—made for your preferred e—reader.
Indeed, the Internet has broken down the walls of online media and challenged legality in new and interesting ways. Interrobang can neither condone nor endorse any services in particular, but in the spirit of care for the students of Fanshawe College, please consider the following to preserve your online health should you choose to download media.
Keep in mind that standard MP3s are roughly one MB per one minute of music. Also, depending on the quality of the MP3s, entire albums will range on average from 60 to 100 MB in size — standard movies are around 700 MB, e—books only a couple of megabytes apiece (they're largely text, after all). Always read the comments on the torrents themselves in order to see the responses of other users online to know whether the file is legitimate, because your school computer is far too valuable to infect with viruses from bad uploads.
Now more than ever there are resources in the way of audio and video online, available to stream for free, so always ask yourself whether or not it's necessary to have a copy of the file or if the online version will suffice for your needs — after all, there's no fun in getting caught in some legal spiderwebs online, we need all the money we can get for food and alcohol.
Infographic originally created and posted by Westwood College (tinyurl.com/college-budget) — citing research into student spending, labour and a poll of students from over 100 campuses across the United States in 2006 — illustrates fairly well where a student spends their money.
There are two interesting omissions on the report, however, in that it doesn't account for how much your average student spends on alcohol (although it may account for the reason the 'Discretionary' element clocks in at a whopping 40 per cent of the overall figure), and how much is spent on 'downloadables' ... music, movies, e—books, video games and more.
The truth is, thanks to the Internet and that one famous levy on recordable media here in Canada all those years ago, Canadians have long since accepted downloading music, television shows and even textbooks as a part of everyday life. The misconception has always been that downloading the media is all right as long as its not uploaded again in turn, but that is incorrect.
The private copying levy, introduced as a part of the Canadian Copyright Act in 1997, mandated that a sum of money be charged on recordable media in addition to sales taxes to then be paid to private recipients to offset their losses due to private copying. Simply put, if you download music or other media and then burn it to a CD or DVD for your own personal use, you have legally engaged the governing bodies of those media and upheld the law.
While the levy was heralded as a victory upon its introduction, time has gone to show its indirect enabling of downloading amongst users here in Canada. When you think about it, the biggest threat in 1997 was the writeable CD-R drive in new computers and the newfound ability to make instant copies of commercial CDs. Although MP3 technology was finalized and made the industry standard in the early 1990s, Napster wouldn't usher in the file sharing era until 1999 — but when it did, the private copying levy created just enough grey area for Canadians to download all manner of media to their heart's content.
Now, nearly 15 years later, people can download almost everything but clothes. Torrent aggregators like scrapetorrent.com and isohunt.com (the latter of which is celebrating its eighth birthday) allow you to search torrent servers all at once, and programs like Calibre can be used to convert text in any format into a file ready—made for your preferred e—reader.
Indeed, the Internet has broken down the walls of online media and challenged legality in new and interesting ways. Interrobang can neither condone nor endorse any services in particular, but in the spirit of care for the students of Fanshawe College, please consider the following to preserve your online health should you choose to download media.
Keep in mind that standard MP3s are roughly one MB per one minute of music. Also, depending on the quality of the MP3s, entire albums will range on average from 60 to 100 MB in size — standard movies are around 700 MB, e—books only a couple of megabytes apiece (they're largely text, after all). Always read the comments on the torrents themselves in order to see the responses of other users online to know whether the file is legitimate, because your school computer is far too valuable to infect with viruses from bad uploads.
Now more than ever there are resources in the way of audio and video online, available to stream for free, so always ask yourself whether or not it's necessary to have a copy of the file or if the online version will suffice for your needs — after all, there's no fun in getting caught in some legal spiderwebs online, we need all the money we can get for food and alcohol.
