Parallel of Economic and intellectual development and copyright laws

One reason I believe to be true is that copyright protection has paralleled with economic development and intelligence of more people. This is why copyright laws have developed to the state in which it is today. For example, Shakespeare created a piece that, as stated by Shaviro, could not have been produced during his time. Why? Because technology and intelligence of the masses were not in place to create a derivative of his piece or perhaps take his piece. That is why only original copyrighted material was protected. Yes, Sir Archduke blah blah blah could have done something to his work, but because of the limited number of people, Shakespeare or his colleagues and friends would have found out. There was increased transparency. Now during our time, things have become clouded as technology such as the internet has emerged and millions of people (relative to Shakespeare’s time) are comparatively much more educated than 400 or so years ago. It is not easy to keep in check all this activity that is going on in this world. Transparency into works is very clouded as we can take an example of someone illegally downloading music. Millions of people do this and we have no idea who these people may be. That is why copyright, I believe, has developed in a way that it is today.

My experience + Washington and Money

I have had a few instances in which my creativity was constrained because of the copyright law. One instance is when I led a sales team to develop a t-shirt for St. Patrick’s Day. I wanted to create Bucky within the context of the Irish theme. After submitting my work to a shirt designer, I received an email that I had to use an original picture of Bucky. Several days later, I informed the Dean who I was using to manufacture the t-shirts. I set up and prepared almost everything so the t-shirts would be distributed to everybody who ordered them before spring break. I was told that the Bucky copyright (trademark?) that the university held only allowed certain t-shirt manufacturers to create this logo on t-shirts. I was at least allowed to reproduce the Bucky b/c of the umbrella I had in being under a University sponsored club. However, the damage I would I have inflicted if I were to distort the image of Bucky would be detrimental to the logo. So after all the hassle my creativity and possible success of the sales run was inhibited. Recently I developed a website for a water ski team, and again my creativity was inhibited as I wanted to ‘poster’ the website with the MasterCraft logo’s, picture, and videos because the boat we used was manufactured by MasterCraft. However I was not allowed to do this after some research and left the website more plain and boring than I wanted it to be. Yes, these are related to trademarks too, but they fall under ‘intellectual property’. The first instance included commercial transformative work that is banned by copyright laws and trademark laws. The second instance was original commercial material that I was trying to utilize. In both experiences, I can totally understand the implications. Having thousands of transformed Buckys’ would dilute the logo. People would ask while watching a commercial or seeing a friends t-shirt, “Is that the original Bucky or a fake one?” Lessig says that copyright (as does trademark) scope has extended to far into the noncommercial uses. I believe this statement to be true. However it also limits free culture and impeded on my creativity to create something totally unique. Here free culture and creativity blends with copyright laws if you can imagine it in your head as a Venn diagram. Should my and others creativity be allowed to flourish or should copyright owners be allowed their uses over their material. Creativity should be allowed to develop and a copyright owner should have exclusive rights to original and transformative commercial work; a balance thus results. However, both extremes are irrational in developing and nurturing our culture in the right way. Now, if I can come up with this blog post from my own experiences, why can’t Washington not create a balance where they can create a culture where there is a vast public domain that includes noncommercial use and copyrights that are only limited to perhaps 40 years. One answer is lobbyists paying them. Do other people in Washington that keeps checks and balances on Congress not see this. Perhaps if there are no other explanations than money flowing into the pockets of politicians, then our whole system of democracy may travel to something farther away from the kind of government we had 50 years ago. (and yes it is a bad thing if a few large companies influence issues that hurts the general public) Things will have no checks and balances and it will spiral out of control. Does anybody have any rational explanations, other than money, to why politicians would extend copyright’s scope to noncommercial use and extending the copyright terms to over 90 years? If not we could be in trouble.

Night Ripper CREATES culture

Plunderphonics-- taking existing music and "ripping" them to create a whole new work
Blue Ocean Space- the act of entering a market that nobody else thought of with an idea, product, or service.

I see Girl Talk’s music as a representation of our culture and time period. Looking in retrospect, if somebody ripped and made a CD of the top 200 artists of the 1920’s or something, what would we think of it today. I would surely think of it as Brilliant!!! What if every generation did this? How representative of our culture would this be? And then we could rip and burn music from say the 1920’s and perhaps 2005 and make a brilliant CD that meshes the two time periods. Possibilities…..possibilities!!!

Lastly, I am finding it very hard to find Girl Talk’s album Night Ripper on Itunes or any other legitimate mp3 website. How about in the stores? Wal Mart? This must say something about their CD and the perception of big album companies. Although Girl Talk is fair use according to the law. DJ’s are a great example of, I would argue, a more serious version of ripping and contextualizing other’s music while performing at clubs and what not. Many artists and rappers change their music by creating alternate versions. He is essentially entering a transformative area of a market where no one else went before. Obviously there are many laws that thus do not apply to Girl Talk’s version of music and it will be interesting to see where the law goes to either inhibit or expand their creative genre.

Conglomerate

Additionally, it might be common knowledge if you think the information you're presenting is something your readers will already know, or something that a person could easily find in general reference sources. But when in doubt, cite; if the citation turns out to be unnecessary, your teacher or editor will tell you.

Dana Lynn Driscoll.

Previously, my definition of plagiarism was distorted. To begin, my understanding of plagiarism was too broad. My belief was that anything I knew was common knowledge; ignoring whether my audience knew the information. Thus quotes or paraphrases that I did not expect to be detected by Rowan and others were highlighted as plagiarism, as shown in my comment paper. Many topics included, “The Marshal Plan…..” (without quotes). It was knowledge that I had already known. I didn’t consider my audience and should have cited this as paraphrasing. However, I seem to want to have my knowledge and facts unquoted without citations because then it becomes obvious that someone would easily catch it. Additionally, my audience did not detect any of the plagiarism that I intended to hide from people. For instance, I quoted phrases from famous US presidents such as, “Ich bin ein Berliner” by Ronal Reagan. Obviously this is a quote by Kennedy; however, I thought that others would understand this is not quoted and recognize this as plagiarism; giving credit intentionally to the wrong person. This was not the case as it occurred many times throughout my paper and people just assumed that it was quoted and plagiarism was not applicable here. Perhaps, to constitute it as plagiarism, I could have cited these quotes with outlandish websites or books. Moreover, I inserted many well known phrases in the paper. One instance when I was writing my paper I integrated a phrase by OJ when he said, “The globe does not fit” (without quotes). To be very sly, I intentionally took his quote and used it in my paper. I would argue that this is plagiarism. I also put such famous quotes like “I have a dream” (without quotes) hoping others would catch it and mark it as plagiarized when I was just using it within the context of the sentence. I failed to consider my audience and thus devastated my chances as being the best plagiarizer.
For these reasons, I named my paper “Conglomerate”. I tried to present a different idea of plagiarism to throw people off in catching my mistakes. It worked. I did fail to forget that knowledge already known by me was perhaps not understood by my audience and it could be argued that giving credit to the wrong person is not plagiarism. Perhaps if I was presenting this to historians or international relations professors, many facts or ideas about the past that I used would not have to be quoted. As of right now, I have a much better understanding the common knowledge rules of plagiarism and have shied away from believing that attributing others work to other people is constituted as plagiarism. My understanding of what constitutes common knowledge is concrete. I now believe plagiarism only to be stealing somebody else’s idea and claiming it as your own. The writers of UW-Madison policies directly focused the definition of plagiarism on this only topic. However, am I correct in constituting plagiarism as attributing work towards others, and should common knowledge about history not needing citation even if it is not know by the reader? How would one judge the intelligence of our audience on a subject?