Remixing Culture
Objectives:
- Become acquainted with copyright as a historic, cultural and economic paradigm and its value and pertinence to creative works.
- Explore the changing nature of copyright in the context of “Remix Culture” and the “Fifth World”
- Examine their own and others values and paradigms of ownership and authorship of cultural media.
- Evaluate the meanings of real and fake and examine their intersection with personal and cultural identity and authenticity
Original Post:
In the article Cultures Compared the author Larry Lessig basically subdivide the artistic values or our generation in to two sub divisions the “RO” and “RW”. The RO as he defines it “is fueled by professional” and RW “is fueled by both amateur and professionals” (Lessig, 2010). Our generation is marked with the creativity of remixes and this remixes are normally carried out by the RO group. As he talks about the importance of the vocal cord that was brought up by John Philips Sousa, he states remixes if the modern era is the way the youth of this generation express their vocal cord. Moreover, he states, by making remixes this generation does not only expresses their vocal cords but also show their creativity in an artistic manner. Here he explains the concepts of read and write as he states, “of course reading is important. Of course it is ‘fundamental’. But human reach far beyond fundamental” as we expresses need to express these fundamentals in every form of “cultural meaning” by expresses our own thought of these fundamentals by writing. However, Lissig claims that the laws such as copyright limit the creativity of the modern age. As his argument follows, he makes the point that piracy differs from remixes as in remixes people create new dimensions of a particular culture.
As we can see of the examples of The Grey Video the mixture of samples form the beetles and Jay-Z’s rap this represent a cultural importance although it was denounce by the copyright owner of the beetles, it attracted the attention of thousands through the Internet. This attraction to the remix represents the creativity that shows the artistic nature of such form of media. Another example of this can also been seen in the usage of the Amen Break over the years. This track not only shows how music can be remixed in many ways to create new trends but also shows that by placing copyright laws on such music would have also limited creativity.
Finally, even thought copyright does shows many disadvantages, I still believe that it is important in society. Though the disadvantages limit creativity, I think we could modify the copyrights laws in a way that would only concentrate on piracy and creativity.
Reflection:
The video above shows the rules of copy rights and plagiarism on wikipedia. Wikipedia today is the internet biggest encyclopedia and the world most used encyclopedia. The age of popular culture has changed a lot including the way we do our research. Today, students do way more internet research than books research in enormous libraries. This is primarily because of its easy access and also because of its ability to point out exactly what one is looking for. This has improve the way of research for billions of people as many countries have access to internet than a proper public library to find what they are looking for. Wikipedia in this process of internet research have developed the internet greatly by providing a public domain in which people can write about something that they know about as experts, as student and as the developer. Though, for academic purposes Wikipedia is not a recommended site but as a student it helps a lot to study a topic before research. The main point is that Wikipedia is a site that is both creative and educational that is made with the remixes of individual writing or individual thoughts and is totally supported by copyright and plagiarism laws as long as it sites.
However in the article Cultures Compared Larry Lessig states that “of course reading is important. Of course it is ‘fundamental’. But human reach far beyond fundamental” as we expresses need to express these fundamentals in every form of “cultural meaning” by expresses our own thought of these fundamentals by writing (Lessig, 2008). Here we can see those fundamental Expressed as wikipedia is a site that is important because of the many individual expression of thoughts. Though in the Video above it states that it is against copyright violation to copy and paste songs lyric but we can see these lyric all over internet. Even if there copy right laws that limits creativity there are no such effects on creativity at present unless if such creativity becomes beneficiary with economic value. As we see such remixes in Youtube present and don’t see any interference from copyright laws because for these remixes there is no economic value attaches. Therefore, until the creativity in terms of remixes is sole created for artistic purposes, I think it should not be in violation of any copyright law but if for economic purposes then I think people should reward the maker with loyalties as if not for his work such remixed creation of art would never been made.
Future:
I would further like to study individual creativity law as it really important to know what extend such law limit creativity. And also analyze the effects it has on both economic aspects and culture aspects.
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