Reflection of this course

We are coming towards the end of the semester. Now that I reflect back to the assignments and classes we had, I think it was not bad as I thought. Classes were fun, especially because we had a lot of discussions and we worked in groups. The assignments were hard and time consuming but Prof. Mckinley always took time explaining and he also gave us time to prepare and discuss with my classmates so I always felt ready to write my essays. I think not only because this class was a mandatory class, but classes were also interesting so I had the best attendance among all the courses that I have taken in Sophia. (although I often asked if we can finish early.. haha)

This blog was also fun to write. We were allowed to write anything if it was something about our topic so it kept me motivated. I enjoyed sharing my favorite movies. I also liked reading what others were writing because we usually don't have a chance to read what others are thinking and what they like.

I hope public speaking will be an interesting course like Comp 2! :)

My Survey Result

I conducted a survey about internet piracy from July 2 - July 7 through Survey monkey and by hand. I used SNS such as twitter, facebook, and line to ask my friends to answer survey. All the people who answered my survey are students. The result came out almost as I expected.

Number of people : 100people

1. What is your gender?
Male 34%
Female 66%

2. Have you lived abroad? if yes when and where
No 49.5%
Yes 50.5%
Places: Taiwan, India, Australia, Korea, China, England, Singapore, US, Vietnam, Canada, Belgium, Turkey, Philippines, Russia, Dubai

3. How often do you watch movies?
Everyday 1%
Every week 22.5%
Every month 46%
twice a month 28%
Never 2%
Other
Most people who answered other watches movie whenever a interesting movie is out.

4. Do you download or watch movies online?
Yes 72.7%
No 27.3%

5. Order these Crimes
Most answered that internet piracy is the least serious and murder as most serious. However, theft and sexual harassment changed places from time to time.

6. Do you think internet piracy is bad?
Yes 52%
No 48%

Furthermore, by looking at the data closely, I figured out that more people who have lived abroad downloaded movies from internet and they also did not think internet piracy is serious. Also Male tend to download movies more than female.

My Survey Questions

*This is a blog post that was due on June 30th.

For my final research paper I am planning to write how laws and movements that opposes internet piracy is meaningless because it is almost impossible to regulate people from pirating.

My big question for my final essay is,
What, if any, benefits do governmental laws bring to internet piracy?

Demographic Questions
1. What is your gender?
2. Have you lived abroad? (other than Japan) If yes, where and how long?

For my demographic questions, I am trying to find the difference in people's thoughts about internet piracy depending on gender and also between people who only lived in Japan and those who came from abroad. I assume that male downloads movie more often than female students. Also, I assume that those who have lived abroad does more downloading on internet than those who stayed in Japan. Furthermore, it would be great if I can see the difference between the countries people are from. (eg. People from US downloads movie more than those from Thailand)

Research Questions
1. How often do you watch movies?
2. Do you download or watch movies online?
3. Order these crimes in order of weight.
    internet piracy   theft   murder   sexual harassment
4. Do you think Internet piracy is bad?

My research questions tries to find how common downloading movies are among students. I also aim to find how concerned people are about internet piracy by asking the question 3 and 4.

Most pirated movies of all time!

*This is a blog post that was due June 23

I recently read an article about the top 10 most pirated movies of all time on TorrentFreak. TorrentFreak is a weblog that uploads news about a peer-to-peer file sharing software, BitTorrent. BitTorrent is one of the most common software used to share files on internet and it has 150 million active users. TorrentFreak often talks about latest copyright issues and it releases the top 10 most pirated movies for each week, every year and for all times. The article I read was posted on October 12, 2011.

The article presents a list of top 10 movies that was downloaded through BitTorrent since 2006. Here is the list.

1. Avatar - 21 million downloads
2. The Dark Night - 19 million downloads
3. Transformers - 19 million downloads
4. Inception - 18 million downloads
5. The Hangover - 17 million downloads
6. Star Trek - 16 million downloads
7. Kick-Ass - 15 million downloads
8. The Departed - 14 million downloads
9. The Incredible Hulk - 14 million downloads
10. Pirates of the Caribbean: A World's End - 14 million downloads

By looking at the list, all movies that are in the top 10 list are high grossing movies that are very famous. Moreover, Avatar is actually the best grossing movie of all time and The Dark Night and Star Trek is in the top 5 list too. By looking at these statistics, it shows how internet piracy does not necessary affect movie gross revenue. Furthermore, we can see how great amount of movie is downloaded illegally without paying through the number of downloads. This shows how internet piracy common among users of peer-to-peer software. It also shows how a lot of people do not see piracy so seriously.

Through such a simple list of statistics, it shows us a lot of things. I was surprised on the amount of downloads that were done. Since this list was made in 2011, I believe after year and a half, there are more and more downloads made through BitTorrent.

Retrieved from http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-movies-of-all-time-111012/

Critical Analysis

Question : What, if any, benefits do governmental laws bring to internet piracy?

Text 1
McClearn, M. (2013, February 18). A New Weapon Against Online Piracy. Canadian Business, 86(1/2), 13­14. Retrieved from http://www.canadianbusiness.com/canadian_business_magazine/index.jsp

This article, written buy M. McClearn provides information about international anti­piracy campaigns and how people have been reacting towards it. The article insists that such effort to stop piracy is not working. It supports this idea through various law suits that happened in Canada and in U.S.. Furthermore, it shows how there are many reasons for avoiding trial since internet is a shared thing, therefore trials usually do not work to protect files from being pirated.This article is biased towards opposition to stopping piracy, and it is aimed towards people who were concerned about piracy. Rather than analyzing the problem, this article shows examples on what is actually happening and what real reactions are towards anti­piracy campaigns.

Text 2
Growth of Internet Piracy. (2011, November1). Congressional Digest, 90(9), 261­288. Retrieved from http://www.congressionaldigest.com

This article shows the threat piracy brings to the United States. It shows three aspects internet piracy have caused, amount of money U.S. have been losing, lost job opportunities through online services, and the fact that they are going against the First Amendment. The article saids that these thefts are increasing because of the reason that they can steal things anonymously in the internet. It discusses how we should stop piracy by providing emotional and logical reasons by shocking us by providing statistics and examples. Since it is an article from a U.S. senate report, it is creditable. Furthermore, I believe it is written to aim academic audience.

My Final Essay

I have been writing about movies from different countries or movies that show different cultures in my blog, and therefore I have chosen the theme of my final essay to be about piracy. As internet became common, people started to upload and share a lot of things online. Though as soon as this started, internet piracy have come up as one of the major problems in internet community. Sharing copyrighted files are illegal and governements are having a hard time restricting such actions. On the other hand, internet have spread throughout the globe and now since people can access files from different parts of the world, piracy problem have become worldwide.

Since internet piracy is a problem all around the world, I want to look into piracy from differnt cultural perspective. I am hoping to find out how people's reactions and government's actions are different depending on the culture. furthermore, I also want to see how internet piracy is affecting the economy and the society.

As I research about the topic there were some questions that came into my mind.
Some questions that I wondered are..
Should governments restrict internet piracy? What, if any, benefits do governmental laws bring to internet piracy? and since the internet has spread around the world, shouldn't the world have a universal law about internet piracy that all countries should follow?

So far my thesis looks like..
The spread in internet piracy brought great challenges to governments: if they should restrict piracy by making a law, or keeping as it is to protect human rights.

Les Miserables

Les Miserables is a film released in 2012 based on a musical that was based on a novel written by Victor Hugo. This film shows a story of Jean Valjean, a man who was a convict but turned to become a mayor after his release. He starts to take care of Cosette (a girl on the poster of this movie) as he continues to get away from the police inspector Javert, who was his inspector when he was a convict. Cossett is a daughter of Fantine who became a prostitute because she was kicked out of Jean Valjean's factory. However, Fantine dies soon after she becomes a prostitute so Jean Valjean takes care of Cosette instead.

This movie teaches us a lot of things. One thing they depict is the history of france. It shows the turmoil in frace during the early 1800s. It depicts the economic problems, class difference, and the French revolution. French revolution especially is a big part of this film, since rebellion was an event that brought the tie of Cosette, Jean Valjean, and Cosette's fiance Marius. It also teaches the importance of love and compassion. Jean Valjean is almost like the symbol of love. After he learns how to love and feel compassion in a church that saved him after he got out of prison, he loves and cares about the society and the people around him a lot. He especially loves Cosette and he protects her no matter what happends to himself. As we see his love and compassion towards everyone, it makes our heart fraught with emotions.


I had never cried so much by watching movie as I did for this one. Like the title, people were miserable and the amount of work Jean Valjean gave to protect these people and Cosette brought tears to my eyes. Although I hear stories that some parts were different from the novel, I really think that it was a great movie. It really taught me what love and compassion was. I recommend this to anyone who likes musicals and also to those who want to learn the background or the real atmosphere that French revolution had! It was definitely the best movie I watched in 2012!

Trailer

English Composition 2 class

We've gone through half of the semester already. In this quarter, we have learned a lot of concepts in writing. Personally, learning how to write rhetorical Analysis and also using APA format was pretty new and I gained a lot from learning them because it is something that we will definitely use in our future classes. I also like how in most of our assignments, we are allowed to choose our own topic depending on our interest. In that way, we can be more motivated to write our papers. Using a lot of time on boring topics that we are not interested in are pretty hard to keep concentrated...

Along with a lot of new things that we learned, there were a lot of reviews for things we did in composition 1 and in high school. Inference paper was one of them and also the readings that we have done, (chapter 1, chapter 3, harbrace, etc) were mostly reviews. Like others have written in their blogs, it felt like we were not really challenged in this class, however, it have been a good review class that made us look at a lot of important concepts in writing again. Knowing things that we reviewed, (logos, ethos, pathos, conclusion, premise, etc) is essential in all classes that we will take in the future.

Also since we will not be taking writing class after this semester, I think it is important to fix our writings and know what good writing is before we end this class. I want to make use of this class so that I will not be regretting in the future!!

Internet Piracy in Different Culture

 

(Propaganda poster to stop illegal downloading and making aware how they are being seen all the time)

 

Internet have spread throughout the world and people use them daily. Internet brought us great convenience to our lives, allowing us to download various files such as musics and movies. However, as downloading flourished, illegal downloads has come up as a recent issue. Lately in the past few years, a lot of countries started to pass specific laws for internet piracy. Depending on the countries, their action towards piracy and public's reaction towards it are different. 

Some countries that pushes the anti-piracy law strongly are Canada and Australia. In Canada, the law was renewed recently so that content producers can go after people who are sharing illegal contents (like what it is said in the poster above!). Furthermore, Canadian Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement has noticed the people how they have the technology to monitor piracy to make the public aware of the situation. Through this movement, they have found more than one million Canadians that share copyrighted contents over the internet. As an example, one person payed two million dollars for downloading only two illegal movies. Similarly in Australia, after Australian Copyright Council passed the copyright law in 1968, there was one person who payed 150 million dollars for providing P2P software illegally.  

You can watch the news showing the situation in Canada here.

Company tracks illegal downloading of 1 million Canadians | CTV News

There are also countries that recently passed laws such as New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. Anti-piracy law was passed in April 2011 in New Zealand. However, it did not really affect the sales. In fact after passing the law the revenue fell 2.1% in 2012. In Japan, when the law was passed in June 2012, the total revenue grew by 4 % but digital revenue fell 24.5% so again, the law did not make a difference in sales. Just like Japan, in South Korea, law passed in 2009 and the revenue grew 4.4 % and digital revenue dropped by 25%.

Unlike New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea, in France, as soon as the law was passed in 2009, digital sale grew by 32.4%. This shows how public were aware about the issue. Surprisingly, U.S does not have a specific law that regulates piracy. However, the private institutions that manages the issue make the public aware of the situation. That organization is called, Center of Copyright Information. Similar to what Canadian Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement are doing, they use the system called The Copyright Alert System, or the Six Strikes, to find people that are downloading illegal files from the internet and notify them to stop. This has been a big news recently making the public alert. 

Reaction towards piracy is different between culture. I believe it also depends on how much the government or organizations have pushed the issue to make the public aware. Myself, living Japan, I do not really hear much about internet piracy. Furthermore, other than these countries, a lot of developing countries such as Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and a lot more still does not have the law for internet piracy and have increasing number of crimes. Making the public more aware of piracy is important not only for the economy but also for ourselves. Both to show respect to the industry and also to protect ourselves from being convicted, lets resist downloading illegal files.

Source : 

http://www.copyright.org.au/

http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/1556656/business-matters-did-anti-piracy-laws-improve-revenue-in-new-zealand-or

http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/company-tracks-illegal-downloading-of-1-million-canadians-1.1057091

 www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_sof_pir_rat-crime-software-piracy-rate

Studio Ghibli

 I believe, a lot of people have one movie that they love since their childhood days. One of my favorite films, and probably for many Japanese people's, are from Studio Ghibli. Studio Ghibli is a Japanese animation film studio headed by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. The studio have successfully produced various films since 1985 and they are best known for the film, My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. Studio Ghibli is a well known studio not only in Japan but also around the world. Along with the world known, Disney, it have captured a lot of children's hearts as they created various amusing films.

These are trailers for some Studio Ghibli films:

Among the various films from Studio Ghibli, one of my all time favorites are, My Neighbor Totoro, and, Kiki's Delivery Service. These two films are those that I have been watching for countless times since I was a baby.  I probably liked these two films since it does not really have violent scenes or wicked monsters like some other Studio Ghibli films. Furthermore, both taught me a lot of aspects needed as I grow up. My Neighbor Totoro taught me family bonds and culture of a traditional Japanese village and, Kiki's Delivery Service depicted a struggle of a teenage girl and her development to get her independence.

Along with how Studio Ghibli teaches children human values, it also teaches us traditional Japanese culture. Films from Studio Ghibli often takes place in olden time Japan, especially around the period after the WWII. Character lives in a old house, like the ones in Totoro or the Grave of the Fire flies, and depicts people's usual lives like getting water from a well. It teaches the younger generation how the lives were in the past and gives us an image on how well our lives are right now. Furthermore, the setting often expresses the struggle people were experiencing after Japan surrendered at the end of World War. Knowing this struggle and the ideas people had at that time is important since those ideas are still left as a base of our thoughts, like the relationship with other countries.

In overall, Studio Ghibli is not only a company that shows amusing anime but a film maker that entertains us and teaches us moral values and culture at the same time. Myself being Japanese and growing up in Japan, I have devoted a lot of my childhood time watching their film and they are and will be one of my favorite film makers. Although Hayao Miyazaki is getting older, I hope Studio Ghibli will stay the same and keep on creating amazing anime, so that my generation who watched a lot of their film will be able to show it to our children too!

Life In A Day

Life In A Day released in 2011 is a documentary film showing a day of a life of people from around the world. All the scenes shown in the film was filmed on 24th of July, 2010 filmed by the people who are in the movie. It depicts the footage of people's real day. The film was directed by Kevin Macdonald and produced by Ridley Scott.

Here is the trailer

This film is not something that we really get into it and lose time. There is no action, no mystery, or anything special. However, it is a film that makes us think.  Makes us think about life and what we love and value. There are also a lot of scenes that we would never experience or see in our own lives. The scene people slaughter a cow is probably one of them. The slaughtering scene is something that was really hard to see but was left in my mind even after I finished watching this film. It made me realize how much things are being sacrificed for us to live.

This film is also full of different emotions. It shows happiness, love, anger, sadness, loneliness, and so on. Towards the end there are parts that contrasts those emotions as they show disasters that are happening at the same time when people are having fun. Also the scene asking people what they fear the most showed the dark side of reality as a lot of people answered, death and loneliness.

In overall, this film was very interesting for me. This film depicts, human reality, cultural difference, human value, and made me realize many other things that people usually don't really think about seriously in their daily lives.  It was also something that made me reflect on my own life and it changed my thoughts about it. I am glad that I saw it recently, because now, being a college student is the time of my life when I think a lot about my future life.

Since this film is available free on YouTube, in 17 different languages, I recommend people, especially college students, to see this film on their spare time.
here is the link to the film:  http://www.youtube.com/movie/life-in-a-day?feature=mv_sr

Purpose of this blog

Movies and TV shows are interests that a lot of people have in common. Since it is something a lot of people are interested, I want to share some popular/good movies and shows by writing reviews and sharing my thoughts about it. Moreover, I hope this blog becomes an inspiration for those who do not usually see movies to start watching them.

I aim the audience to college students who have time and also seeks for inspiration as they think of their future. I hope they can benefit a lot by watching different movies and TV shows since visuals are worth a thousand words! Since I am a third culture kid, bilingual, and have a lot of interest in other cultures, I am planning to share movies and shows not only from the U.S. but from the world. Through film from different places, I hope people can see and learn the difference and similarity in the global world.

I am hoping to post trailers, picture, links, or other related videos along with my reviews so that it would be easier for people to access and to visualize what I am talking about. By posting visual elements, I hope it would catch people’s eye and would also be easier for them to start reading my blog. Furthermore, I will use statistics of the movies/TV shows that I will share to further interest and to show how reliable my reviews are!

I hope you will enjoy the movies and TV shows shared here along with my reviews!