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”
• Examine your own and others values and paradigms of ownership and authorship of cultural media.

Original Post

Copyrights are a new addition the the world today, and have made a huge difference in how people interact. Copyrights provide both value, and dangers that have a major influence on how the future will play out. Copyrights provide the protection that is needed in modern times for ideas and creations that without there will be unknown of who has created it. This allows people to take credit which is something that should be allowed. This is something that is very important in todays day and age so that people are not taking others creations. The dangers that come along with copyright laws is the fact that it is becoming more and more possible to copyright anything, and this will at a point become to much, copyrighting people, ideas, and things past creations, like DNA and people after a while. This has become prevalent in cases like Monsanto copyrighting its beans. Copyrighting can also limit creativity by making people disregard new creative thoughts by making people not want to try and make something new similar to the currently copyrighted. This limits people from making new things with slight differences because they have some similar attributes. Like in the TED talk taking different things and combining them with new technology is creating something completely different and shouldn’t have to deal with copyrights.”Taking the songs of the day and the old songs and remixing them to make them something different….Theres something called anime music videos”(Lessig). This is what makes copyright laws so confusing because it can come into contact with this creative remixing, and its hard to tell when something is an original idea like the remixing, or if it becomes infringement on a copyright.

I believe that there needs to be some limitations on copyright laws. There has to be some sort of limitation when copyrights are regarding sensitive topics like people and DNA. I feel like this is the most important regard for copyright laws.

Reflection

This weeks topic was something that I am somewhat angry about just because copyright laws are in my mind just infuriating. I did enjoy learning and reading about it, but it is something that makes me angry to see. The fact that everything down to DNA is being copyrighted is a little bit absurd to me. I feel like this kind of laws preventing copying is also something that is halting change and intellectual exploration because of the fear of copyrights. I picked this piece because of this fire inside of me about this topic and how it makes me feel. To me the degree to which copyrights have been taking is actually creating a stoping point for us as humans because whenever something new may want to be created there has to be a bunch of precautions and checks to see if it is violating any of these laws.

The other part of this weeks topic that I did really enjoy learning about what the remix aspect, and how something can be remixed to create something new. Although this will obviously be close to taking something I feel like artistically this is creating something new, and although you are using something created by somebody else it is evident and in a sense giving back to original creator. In the example of EDM music how people alter and change beats to create a ‘new’ song but have parts of the base song in the background it is clear that it was taken from someone else, but at the same time you can clearly tell what was taken and that in a sense to me is giving them this credit. I don’t feel like people who remix things are stealing in any way. Looking at remixing has allowed me to look at my values surrounding ownership and authorship of todays cultural media.

Future

I do not have great hopes about the future of remixing. Copyright laws are only becoming stronger, as well as the fact that people are trying more and more to create knew things and being sued. This is a topic that I am more up to date on that others and will continue to learn and be informed about because this is something that will most likely effect me in some way or another. I want there to be a positive outcome in the future for the topic of remixing, but I am somewhat skeptical of this. By staying up to date with what happens I hope to avoid any troubles than may come with copyright infringement and hopefully see a positive change.

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