We watched the video “RiP! A Remix Manifesto”. This documentary was extremely interesting. At the beginning, it introduced the artist Girl Talk who creates mashups of songs. The narrator then posed the question “Can you guess whose songs these are?” and immediately I said, “Jackson 5” and “Queen” to which I was told I was wrong. Immediately, this caught my attention. I am a major music lover and have often connected the beats of different pieces. I didn’t ever understand how the songs “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme…” by ABBA and “Hung Up” by Madonna could both begin with the exact same beat. I have always known copyright is a thing as I am a university student and plagiarism is just another form. If copyright is using things that other people have created then I do agree we should all be sued for copyright infringement.
One of the things this documentary made me think of was one of my friend’s professors had said “you will never have an original idea in your life”. This is the idea that everything we have has come out of something else. Nothing is original it is all a product of something else. Therefore, it is unfair to say that Girl Talk is not creative because if taking things from the past and using them to create something new is deemed as so then creativity would not exist. In saying this though, I understand the reasoning behind copyright in many extents. Things used to be all in the public domain and people were able to build off them freely. Now people are trying to protect their individual ideas and products. I do not believe you should be able to steal things that other people have created and make take them as your own but I think that idea of stealing should be changed. Copyright infringement is a pricey thing to gamble with but it should not hide media and content. Credit people for the things they have made and produced! If you are working off of what they have made they should be credited for what they have done. The most shocking aspect of this was when the video began to talk about Science documents. To think that information people have discovered about Cancer is unable to be accessed by other people because it is patented is shocking. It’s a very selfish idea to think that someone needs to withhold their findings that could assist another person just because they probably want to be the one to find the cure. Information around cancer is definitely not something that should be withheld. All of a sudden I saw a completely new side of this issue that moved simply from sharing and creating music for people to enjoy to something that is a global issue.
Overall, I think the idea of copyright has made the world selfish. We should be able to collaborate and share more. Humans are more powerful when they work together. Maybe more people would be more accepting of others with a more open and accessible world. Maybe we will find the cure to cancer…
OER is a really cool resource. I think teachers should share their lesson plans freely. Teaching is very much about testing new things out and reworking them. Some lessons may fail but why not allow your coworkers to help you work through these things and make it better. This website is awesome to me if you can’t tell from my earlier opinion on copyrighting. Education is a profession that runs off of collaboration and it will ultimately prove to benefit everyone in the long run by having this as an open resource!
