While watching the film on copyright in class today, it opened my eyes to the magnitude of the online war between remixers and the laws of copyright. Watching this war unfold with the remixers arguing their freedom of speech and right to their own creativity, and the laws of copy right saying that you can not go and use other peoples ideas outright and create something new. Over the years, laws have changed in order to give the average person more freedom in accessing copyrighted songs, video clips, and even ideas. This stemmed from the concept that every idea originated from an idea before it.
By using explicit examples of ideas that were created from others (specifically songs) it showed us how it opened the door for people such as Girl Talk to take samples of songs and remixing it to create their own. What is really crazy is that no matter how hard both sides battle about what they feel is there right, both sides continue to break the rules. This was highlighted by the idea of the computer program called Napster. This program is essentially the original Apple Music or Spotify, except the users could download songs for free with no consequences. However, back in the day when the war over copyright was at it’s peak there was numerous consequences that ended in lots of money being owed to the big corporations to those who downloaded these songs for free.
The one argument that stood out to me the most was when one of the head lawyers for the remixers used the analogy of what if remixing a song was actually a student writing an essay. If the student used direct quotes from Shakespeare and then cited him, no one would blink an eye, it would be totally 100% legal. But in the case of using other people’s songs and collaborating them together with other ones to make a remix, it is thought to be extremely illegal and could land people like Girl Talk in jail.
Relating this topic back to the school scene, copyright is quite similar to plagiarism. Without proper citations and not copying word for word and claiming it as your own leads to many problems within the high school and university setting. So teaching students about the rights and wrongs of plagiarism is essential, just like understanding how copyright works before one attempts to steal other’s intellectual property.
I am not sure when this on going, back and forth battle will ever find a resolve but I tend to side with the remixers on this one. Being creative while using another original composition will always happen throughout time because copying is the biggest form of flattery. Artists will always find something they like from another and build off of it to create something they can call their own.
Riley
