There seemed to be a heavy focus (in discussions and I suppose within our materials) on Copyright (C), and the online solution Creative Commons (CC), and I suppose rightfully so. After all the Web has made it incredibly easy to share music, files, images, video and many other 'creative works' - but is this really new?
Going back to the good old days when we bought our music on record or tape. Did we not all tape a copy for a friend at some stage? Even taping music from the radio before it was even released. Isn't this too a form of 'theft'?
Moving to the modern day - radio stations are not allowed to include music tracks in their podcasts, but if we look at dj's who mix and 'mashup' several tracks to effectively create a something reasonably new why is this not ok to share (via podcast) if no one is profiting from it but they are allowed to broadcast it? How and where is the line drawn?
Also has C and CC gone too far? People taking photos of artwork for example and then putting a CC on it. Or C now having the ability to outlive the creator, preventing anyone from using it.
You can't help but wonder that the world has gone mad and that these large corporations that enforce C are just getting greedy - especially if you kind of think in some way that (as our lecturer has pointed out) there is no such thing really as original thought - it is all conceived by things around us that we experience (see, hear, do) that then helps us form the thought coherently, and in some cases express it uniquely.
It is nice to see that mashups are considered within 'fair use' but I think perhaps more needs to bee done to strip large corporations from their power and bring them back on an even playing field. We need a digital revolution to bring everything into the 21st Century (2.0).
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