Home » Education & Career » Multimedia Education » Three news items relevant to students of multimedia

Three news items relevant to students of multimedia

© Anne Kellerman

1. The Supreme Court . on June 27, 2005 ruled against the file sharing service company, Grokster. They unanimously ruled that Grokster could be held responsible for copyright piracy on their networks even though Grokster strictly speaking claimed to just supply the pristine networks. While as a former developer, I can be a bit miffed at the Supreme Court ruling which seems to stifle development of multimedia distribution technologies, as a multimedia educator, I feel it is critically important to educate our students on this issue of digital media copyright and ownership. The Supreme Court tried to made a very careful ruling. They said that companies and individuals could be held accountable if they promoted their device for illegal purposes and if that was their primary intent for offering the device or service. This narrow definition may be difficult to interpret.

2. Macromedia, http://www.macromedia.com, announces new release of its popular Macromedia Studio package. This package includes Dreamweaver - version 8, Flash Professional - version 8, Fireworks , Contribute, and FlashPaper. It does not include Macromedia Director. (Director is a complete authoring system for multimedia heavily used by professionals.) The purchase price of this package is $999. The upgrade price is $399.00. The academic price from places that offer academic discounts is lower. Creation Engine, http://www.creationengine.com, offers a pre-order price of $289.00. Dreamweaver is perhaps the most widely used "what you see is what you get editor" for creating Web pages. Flash allows the Web page creator to add highly optimized animations with interactivity. Fireworks is an image and graphics editor that was developed primarily for the Web. Instead of offering every function and option possible as the venerated image editor, Adobe Photoshop does, it combines functions and only offers what a person creating images and graphics for the Web needs. Contribute helps manage Web content particularly when multiple people have to work on a Web site. FlashPaper is new to me. It appears to be some kind of converter to Adobe's PDF format and to FlashPaper format. It appears that Adobe's purchase of Macromedia has started to inspire efforts to converge their product lines. It has been around for at least two decades. This is an important release for educators involved in teaching about multimedia creation tools.

3. The third news item is news that SBC is offering DSL at a fee $14.95. DSL allows users to access the Internet at US broadband speeds using their telephone wires. Please note the US here as what we have termed broadband in this country is far less than many other countries including South Korea and Norway. The speeds are clearly far superior to dial up and the price is clearly superior, without a doubt. At this price, everyone in SBC's DSL area who now has dial up can surely change to DSL. Unfortunately, while SBC's DSL area is large, it does not include upstate NY. However, this price point will certainly influence other providers to come down on their broadband offerings which ultimately will come to upstate NY. Multimedia needs broadband, even US broadband.

The copyright of the article Three news items relevant to students of multimedia in Multimedia Education is owned by . Permission to republish Three news items relevant to students of multimedia in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.