Week 1 Comment on Rath Loeung’s copyright post

Rath,

I totally agree with your opening point…it’s strange that we’re only looking at copyright now, at the end of our program. Better late than never, though!

Like your students, mine tend to glaze over ideas of copyright and intellectual property. When I tell them that they have to cite the sources they use in a paper, they consider it a formality and, in the age of easybib.com, it really feels that way to me, too.

I really love what you say about giving permission to your audience to reuse your work ahead of time. The fact that you feel like you’re challenging the audience to build on what you’ve created is awesome, and I suspect that it’s becoming a more common sentiment among artists. The creators and authors of tomorrow are today’s children, so it stands to reason that they will be more open to the idea of Creative Commons licenses and “remix culture” than their parents’ generation.

-Kim

Rath’s post

EMDT.MAC - Week 1 Readings Blog Post: "Copyrights"

Usage versus Permission for usage. It can be such a fine distinction. The complexities of copyrights cause some people to ignore them altogether and I've read about and seen both creators and users of intellectual property get burned. While I wonder why such an intense and important topic has only been briefly touched on earlier in the EMDT program, I'm glad we're looking at it now.

As a creative-type, I do have to keep in mind how much I'm just "influenced" by the prior work of others versus an outright mimicry. I do try myself and encourage others, in studying the creative work of others, to copy for the sake of learning. But I've always surrounded the encouragement with a severe caveat about the origins of that work. Acknowledgement may provide some fair-use in education cover, but it's not a guaranteed safety-net. Because copyrights and intellectual property ownership are such abstract concepts, I think that my students often just glaze over whenever the topic comes up.

I think the "Remix Culture" that has emerged comes from the relative ease to take snippets of work and creatively assemble them. The tools are abundant and, often, free. It's what schools, on paper, say they want when talking about the skill of "synthesis" but then try to take the tools away that facilitate it. There are opposing pressures persecuting the public school system in its present state. The pressure is there to evolve and innovate but government has made itself such a big stakeholder in education that maintaining compliance becomes pressure the opposite direction.

I'm in the camp that culture is meant to be shared. Creative Commons may not be a panacea for outdated copyright laws, but it feels pretty darn right. I love putting together some recordings or posting some artwork and giving permission ahead of time to anyone who would want to build new work upon it. There's something about that act that almost feels like a challenge to the audience. And it certainly keeps our culture, whether it be music, art, or any other medium, organic, vibrant, and ever more inspiring.