After this first week in EMDT_MAC and reading about Copyright, Public Domain and Creative Commons as well as reading classmates' comments, I have found that I am rethinking how I feel about Copyright in general.
We mostly talk about Copyright when it pertains to music and movies, but as one of my classmates posted, what about art? What about web pages and original images, buttons, menus created for the web? Are these worthy of Copyrighting? Will people be able to take what they want from websites.
I was looking over several videos that my class as well as others in my district do, and some of the really creative videos were students making parodies of popular songs and making them fit their subject area or something specific to school. Some examples were using the hip hop song, "Teach Me How To Dougie" and rewriting it to fit studying habits calling it, "Teach Me How To Study." Sir Mix-A-Lot's popular "Baby Got Back" becomes "Baby's got Books" and creating a nice library promo, and many more.
So, with parodies, does this help foster creativity or does it stifle it and create a manner that seems to be the only way to express yourself. Does life imitate art or does art imitate life?
If you look at all the videos online, all the "viral" videos, you see a trend of people, "artists" taking that original viral video and creating a parody of their own. Look at one of the originals, "Lazy Sunday" and see how many parodies it created, Rebecca Black's "Friday" is the latest. Even with taking clips from the news and adding a beat behind the voice and auto-tuning it has become a huge part of our media world. Ask Antoine Dawson. Where does Copyright come into play here?
Interesting observations and questions. There is an obvious difference in behavior between the "real world" and typical Internet behavior or Netiquette. Things get even murkier with YouTube because they were smart enough to recognize that most user submitted material is on some level a copyright violation because of incidental background music so YouTube struck deals with the labels to look the other way and allow YouTube to put a link on the videos so that anyone watching the video could click and buy the song. So, again, not something that the rest of us can do, but such is life on the Web.
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