In-Class/Homework Reading Assignment

n/a

9:40-11:46

The video highlights many important issues of "ownership" through creativity and "ownership" through ideas. There is this constant battle of who has the right to say something is theirs, like who created new material as an artist or remixed material as a mashup artist. In the segment that I would like to highlight, this specific scene where the narrator is talking with the lady from the copyright office. In some ways, she agrees that it takes time and talent to create the music that Girl Talk does. However, she disagrees that it is perhaps, entirely his. She says that his music does not limit his creativity, but he  might have issues with copyright companies. Her statements after she views the video contradicts herself. If this is the view that the corporate music industry has as well, it is easy to see how some artists are in this war of who owns what and why. As far as relating to our class and what we are exploring, this easily touches upon some of the issues we have come upon already. These huge companies, like Red Bull, who are deathly afraid of "losing" money from their products place huge limitations as to what the common man can produce and use for his own creativity. When we are creating our videos for Netwriting, we may step on these company's toes, and have our videos shut down. By understanding the inner workings of how copyright works, we can better understand, especially through this video, what we are up against intellectually. 

6:00 - 15:00

55:00 - 58:00

The video goes over copyright and and many of the issues that it comes along with it. Currently the internet is one of the largest parts of today's culture. However due to the relative newness of the internet, its capabilities, and its major impact on society there are many new laws, regulations, and guidlines that are constantly being viewed and drawn up all the time regarding many different aspects. Copyright is a major issue everywhere now as well. In an age where information is constantly produced and spread across nations, it seems ridiculous trying to regulate all of these videos in order to prevent possible intellectual copyright. 144,000 hours of video are uploaded to youtube everyday alone and it is constantly a growing concern with so many new forms of monetization that copyright infringement and undeserved success is very easy. Many companies are taking much greater lengths than should be taken in order to combat some of this. Many times it is not even from the artists themselves but the corporations in control of the artists. Piracy, copyright infringement, and much more has a major impact on society and a lot of times its negative. Radiohead is a great example of someone who saw this and decided they had enough of their record label. When they broke off from their record label they tried something new by letting people decide what they wanted to pay for their new album. This made a lot of people ecstatic and showed what some people would do with a little leway with the current laws. Overall copyright laws currently seem to be hindering some creative possibilities because of its ambiguity and fear it strikes into unknowing people. If these copyright laws were revised it is a definite possibility that many people could flourish and possibly produce new creative material for everyone to enjoy and share.

The segment 40:25-41:30 concisely hones in on the fact that in the early 1900s, creativity became not an artistic endeavor, but a capitalistic one. The very title of the course - "Multimodal Composition" - suggests there is an implicit understanding in which we realize that all of the knowledge we have - the knowledge artists of all kinds (musicians, writers, and so on) draw on in artistic endeavors - is the compilation of our life experiences. Another tenet held by many people is that art is a way of dealing with or explaining or exhibiting life itself. So the conclusion of the syllogism that naturally follows is that many of the things we experience in life are embedded in our art - this is natural and good, not seedy and wrong. The movie "RIP: A Remix Manifesto" is able to successfully argue the point that capitalistic corporations that attempt to strip artists of the very materials that they have the natural instinct to latch onto, or at least severely restrict access to these materials, are silencing an entire generation of artists. While we ought to be cautious and steer away from outright plagiarism, the notion that we as students, attempting to creatively make arguments and inferences about the world we live in currently, *can't* use footage or audio clips of that very world and culture is kind of ridiculous. This documentary is a brave exclamation that this media-savvy generation will no longer be shamed by its predecessor, and will clearly and explicitly define what is just when it comes to copyright and fair use.

This video made me think about the free use of our own videos and the fact that we are all "copyright criminals" according to these copyright laws.  Particularly the part in 23::25- 24:00 where the person speaking likens the idea of us all being copyright criminals (but not admitting it) to Victorians who wouldn't admit to masturbating.  The fact that someone could claim that we're stealing by making these videos online is troubling but moreso, the fact that even a note, even a note split up into little pieces and rearranged, could be considered grounds for a copyright.  If such strict standards are truly the marker then how can anything new be created?  How can anyone create anything?  It seems like the fear of copyright, rather than the copyright itself is really what's guiding copyright law and how we are dealing with copyrights. 

I was really interested in the part 38:50 - 41:00  about Disney's (successful) push for an extension to copyrgiht laws.  Now, rather than works being protected for the life of the author (which would encourage innovation) copyrights stay 75 years after the death of the author and 95 years for corporations.  This is a far cry from the 14 year copyright.  This makes me think about the efficacy of corporations using the work of the authors to make money, even after their death.  They didn't create it, what rights do they have to it? It makes me think of my own Sherlock video and how Sherlock Holmes stories which were written by Sir Author Conan Doyle in the years 1887 -1927.  THe Doyle Estate, of course, claims that all stories have to have passe the copyright year (1923) while "remixers" like fanfic, fanvid, and even derivitive story authors claim that the ideas they use are from stories pre 1923 (only 10 Sherlock Holmes Stories were created post 1923).  What is also interesting in this controversey is that charcters can be trademarked, and such trademarks never run out.  This whole controversey really sheds light on the issue of corporations holding ideas and media out of the hands of remixer, literally, for forever.  This stunts creativity and I think, it brings up the question of what right do these corporations have to these ideas so many years after their creation and so many years after the original creator has died. 

Control disney works to make sure others couldn't build upon them. 

Time 26-32 minutes

Fair Use is a concept that this English course relies upon heavily as the video creations assigned tend to be mostly compilations of existing media to interpret and convey an idea.  Indeed, without the ability to invoke Fair Use, this course could not exist as it does.  It certainly is eyebrow-raising to consider that the same brands that were built upon reimagining existing stories and media are so heavy-handed in their pursuit of closing the proverbial door behind them, as it reeks of hypocrisy.  It’s sinister, really.  When the whole of human culture and history was built on the backs of everything that came before it, it becomes a historical anomaly that something as benign as creating a video collage for learning and to share with friends and peers for entertainment becomes a criminal offense, and scary that the true greatest offender is the same country that lauds itself as being the freest nation on Earth.

Time stamps:

32:00 - 36:55 (Disney)

52:05 - 57:10 (Amp Live/Radiohead)

The maker of RIP a Mashup Manifesto was able to effectively draw on multiple examples when attempting to relay his message concerning the futility and unscrupulous nature of many copyright laws today.  His vision of Walt Disney as an early remixer does a lot to remove any creative stigma associated with the practice of mashups; mashups and reinterpretation of culture are things that have been happening for centuries as opposed to just decades.  After establishing that mashups are a natural end and recursive beginning to the creative process and have been for some time, the author uses a modern-day example of an album that a lot of people are able to remember buying.  Radiohead's novel idea to allow consumers of intellectual property to set their own price for it brought a lot of attention to the possibility of changing current copyright and music-distribution laws. Then, Radiohead took it a step further by allowing their studio-produced albums and videos to be used for collaborative and remixing efforts.  This is an important distinction from what they did with their album before; now, not only were their listeners able to enjoy their music for next to nothing, they were able to produce and share their own music as well.  The fact that AmpLive still had legal troubles with Warner-Chappell concerning his Radiohead mixes is a testament to the fact that copyright companies are not regulating intellectual copyright material as benevolent protectors of artists; in fact, they will fleece other artists of their ability to make and pay for intellectual material for money if they can.  

Specific Time Stamps: 45:00-54:00

I really enjoyed watching this video. I think I have potentially seen it before, however watching it again was supremely helpful in attempting to relay the complicated and difficult relationship between copyright infringmenet and fair use. Does anyone really know what that line is? 

I also just thought that the movie was creative in general and used discretion in presenting the issues that are prominent in this film. Sometimes, even the most mundane of issues can be offensive to talk about.

I thought it was extremely interesting and relative to the class that they mentioned in the film that SIX major movie studios and 4 record labels owned 90 percent of the media/Hollywood, which are owned by even larger companies.

In my mind, this is almost ridiciulous, a specific example is the first video we made in class. Duncan, clearly, was not profiting off of his RedBull Video and yet it still was immediately screeened and taken down by YouTube.

Personally, the concept of "fair use" is a tricky and relative term to define. I believe "fair use" depends on your intentions and if you intend to unfairly profit off of something that is not yours.

The final point I want to make, is the third one mententioned in this video, "the future is becoming less known." 

For example, some copyright infrigment in Canada, could cost upwards of $100,000. Many people are not doing anything wrong in my opinion, the dispersion of information and making "intellectual property" available to as many people as possible will only make our world a better, more infromed, more educated place.

It is inspiring to me that people care enough about this issue to protest it and push boundaries that those who are nervous about gettting in trouble would not. 

      As a whole this video stresses copyright issues, and the fair use associated with it. With that said, before watching this, I found myself in a situation similar to that of the copyright bureau employee in the sense that, I thought what we were doing in class was very borderline, and sometimes even crossed the line. However, after taking time to create my own videos and watching the documentary, RIP, A Remix Manifesto, it is clear that what we have done in class and what girl talk continues to do is in itself a piece of art. Regarding the actual legality of it, I am not well versed enough in copyright and fair use rights to come to a conclusion.

      0-1:30... seemed to be strikingly similar to what we have been doing or attempting to do in class. It had a mix of different sources of audio layered accompanied with a constantly changing image. This strategy was used in a very precise an elegant way that acted as a perfect transition into the actual topic, of Girl talk and how he takes existing songs and "mash's" them together to create a new piece of work/art/music. Shortly after the introduction, the author explains how he has struggled with fair use rights/copy rights and the "war" that this has created. Can you take another's work and mash it up/ remix it? Girl talk believes this will be looked back on and laughed at that sampling and putting two or more already existing forms of art into one and call it its own piece separate from the pieces used. At minute 9, when the author is interviewing the employee at the copyright registrate bureau, we see the actual editing that takes place in the mashup shown to that employee. Although I am not at that level of expertise, it was strikingly similar to the processes I have been going through to make the videos for our class assignments. After the employee completed the film, she seemed stumped, almost like she just saw something earthshattering, as if her whole life she was fighting against these mashup type works to inevitably realize that it is not much different that to take a classic beetles song and change up some of the keys on a guitar. 

The specific time segement talking about fair use went from approximately 26:20 through 28:50.  We have touched on this topic slightly in class, and it is very relevant to our projects.  In the video the producer describes fair use as using small amounts of copyrighted material to make an argument.  The lawer relates fair use in film to that of an essay when we simply use quotations or indentions to cite other authors' words.  For the most part this is what he is doing in the RIP! A Remix Manifesto.  In his mash-up film he is trying to tell a story about copyright with his mainpoint being that copyright, in America, is out of control and manipulated by profit.

The video as a whole related a lot to our projects in class.  The style of the video has many componentssimiliar to our assignments (i.e. video style, audio manipulation, being creative, choosing genres, etc.).  Other parts of the vidoe I simply thought were interesting include: Walt Disney was a mash up artist, but then later in the video it reported that the copyright for Disney was considering making a day care take disney characters off their walls; the mention of copyright laws outside of film that are hindering progress like cancer treatment; the question is art off limits; mash up artists have to work outside the law -- Mouse Liberatlon Front was an example; and many others.

I think the film ended smoothly by mentioning an alternative copyright system, creative commons, which allows musicians the right to sample, create, and remix.

At 8:31 Collaging two songs together began to make a music dilemma and during this intro discussion talk about copyrighting a song and how downloading a song at 8:41 was never done as a mashup. I saw how the young man began to copy a version of a song, paste it in a window, take a note and re-arrange it (9:41) put a beat under it and the song sounded great and it never sounded alike the original beats to me. A lady who works in a copyright department (9:47) was asked was this copyright infringement? WOW it did not sound like the original sounds or beat he copied from the original song. 10:01 The minimal version of using other people's stuff is infringement. An original artist can hear his sound, his beat and it is the artists' creativity that is being infringed upon and it is about control and money. I believe an artist should be paid for their artistic ability. The discussion at 11:04 Turning an artists' music into "something else" and because it is hinged upon "another persons' stuff" does clearly leave at the creativity.18:29 Copyright laws were written for the authors and the right of the public to be creative. Newer and better copying machines were developed. 19:01 The bottom line is balance and the author wants to get paid! The creative genius on the other hand, should be allowed to create but not at the expense of anothers original work and make a profit off of it; is the way I view this.Napster was the first created music sharing network! The publishers felt they were losing control of what they owned. The most interesting segment to me was at 15:01 The discussion was about freely building on another persons work as far back as 1893 when "Happy Birthday" was created people are infringing when they sing this song. Get out of town! People sing this all the time.....Warner/Chappell the largest publishing company in the world will not take a telephone call about a question concerning a copyright, "they only take emails." The internet is one of the fastest social media communications to get a message conveyed. I thought that was rude to not even speak with someone on the telephone. No sampling people. Our mashups could be pulled and I thought I was creative. I will have to keep it simple and use material from the "public domain." I will continue to use my disclaimer on class work and hope they will not shut down our class "mash ups"!!!

In the segment of the Remix Manifesto video that runs from 5:00 to 6:00 minutes, it is stated that the internet connects people all over the world and allows them to share ideas. This is relevant to our class because we did a Twitter project in which we researched a topic and pulled Tweets from all over the world into a database on our research topic. Our class projects have included the use of YouTube clips, which are publicly available to anyone in the world with internet. Although the woman from the copyright law office (9:00 to 12:00 minutes) states that you cannot claim creativity when it is based on another person’s work, the Remixer’s Manifesto (7:03 and 41:00 minutes) states throughout the video that “culture builds on the past,” and that the world’s culture is a “remix of the past.” This is also related to our projects, which are new creations from information, videos, and music from the past. This is similar to writing an essay where work can be quoted from other writers from the past as long as it is cited (27:10 to 27:40 minutes). Similarly, in all our class projects references have been included to show where ideas have been taken from others’ work. 

The difference between copyright and fair use is a very grey line because there is no relative outline for fair us. Completely copying someone’s material for your own benefit is clearly copyright but how much of someone’s words can you use before it’s illegal. As time passes and the age of knowledge and internet sharing becomes more relevant, copyright laws will grey even more and soon maybe phase out. But right now there still a huge issue every day and can land people in hot water as this shows. The part at 8:30 when the young man started making his audio mix with the two songs and then he began to changes the underlying beat to make it sound completely different. I really thought that must be completely legal but mashing up is more than just little changes I realize. He had to put more effort in to make the song not anywhere near the normal one.

4:53-5:27

26:00-29:00

The video: RIP! A Remix Manifesto centers around the growing issue of copyright infringement and how the internet and other technologies are being used as a means to create and recreate popular aspects of previous culture(music, movies etc.).  As described by the narrator "this is a war of ideas, and the battleground is the internet." The basic tenets of this video are that culture builds on the past, the past tries controlling the future, our future is becoming less free, and to build free societies you must limit past control. The video as a whole relates directly to the major theme of our class: the study of social media. It explores the specific aspect of copyrights and how they infringe on the expansion of social culture. This is the exact thing we are learning about in class: the expansion of our social culture through things like social media and networking/writing.

  I think the first major relation I saw from this video to our class was the segment from 4:53-5:27. It starts by showing sort of the birth of this new media fast track that we have been on, and portrays the internet as a means of sharing information and ideas. The main focus is that we are all in someway, shape or form connected, and that a "media literate" generation was born when the internet began to take over. I find this most relevant to our Social media 1st video project, because that portrays the extent to which social media has affected us. This segment sort of shows the origin of that and how the birth of networking and literacy came to dominate the world as we know it. It also explained that "the consumers are the creators" which is something extremely relevant to what we have learned on how social media has been a ground to help expand creativity among consumers.

I find this class in general to be a lot about "virtual essays" in that we basically make videos that resemble essays. There is typically some sort of thesis in these videos, whether it be the title or the message of the video. This in general relates a lot to the clip from 26:00 to 29:00 which talks about Fair use, or the amount of small segments of copyright material that can be used to make an argument of copyright infringement. This relays right back to our class, as the majority of our videos have taken youtube videos, twitter feeds, or news clips and merged them to form a specific argument or message. The lawyer sort of relates the different music or video clips to quotations we use in essays from different texts, in that everyone should have the right because if we can do it in literature, we can in media. However, due to the high profit and other financial aspects that come from getting copyrights, taking segments from media has gone out of control, as people look more for making money rather than expanding creativity.

This film is very relevant to our class, as we have all been trying to find the right balance between creating our own content in our video projects, and stealing other people's ideas. This is a very complicated topic that is discussed with a certain amount of depth in "RIP, A Remix Manifesto". I think that the segment between 8:30 and 15:00 in the video is a good summary of the major points of this argument. In the beginning of this segment, we have the women who represents the point of view that states that no matter how much is changed, nobody should have the right to use the tiniest bit of someone's work without their explicit permission. What follows this clip represents the counterpoint to this argument, namely, that some of the most popular, most respected pieces of art in our culture were based heavily off of someone elses work. The filmmakers show this by describing the chain of sampling that went from The Staple Singers to the Rolling Stones to Andrew Oldham Orchestra to The Verve and finally was reappropriated by Girl Talk. I believe that all great pieces of art are similar to this, in that they are heavily based on other people's creations. Therefore, I believe that it is okay to use someone else's work as long as the meaning that is created with the usage of it is altered enough from that of the "original work", that it cannot be truthfully described as stealing an idea.

We live in a digital society with unprecedented access to information past and present. An infinite range of meanings can be produced just by deconstructing and reconstructing existing artwork. Within the economic model of capitalism, it becomes necessary for artists to produce new meanings in as fast and efficient a way as possible. In such a society, the old romantic/modernist ideal of art as a form of self-expression becomes irrelevant. Today's artists, instead, aim to produce "culture". They surrender their personal stake in their art - instead, they become tools to express collective, universal values. This communal form of art is evident in the structure of Girl Talk's concerts. The lights are dimmed. Within the crowd, the individual loses their sense of self, become part of a collective emotional moment.

Culture, as the video says, always builds on the past. In the future, I think we will see the disappearance of the "artist" altogether. Artists will transform into critical theorists, examining and derived new meaning from the shards of the past. This is the role we take on in class - rather than producing new content, we copy and recombine existing content to suit our purposes using screencast software.

8:00-12:00

I believe that all segments of the video are equally relevant to our class, but I did want to write about this particular segment. I find Girl Talk to be extremely interesting, as my favorite genre of music has been mashups since I first heard the likes of Girl Talk and Super Mash Bros. In the first two projects we have done in class, although they have been a twitter video and a Pulic Service Announcement, we have taken works from many other people. It would have been extraordinarily difficult for us to come up with a competely original video from recording our screen doing anything other than typing, and because of certain artists like Girl Talk, we understand that we are allowed to take certain video and audio from others and, only if we are using it for the purposes of creating some other sort of project, copy it exactly in our own artwork. Yes, it is true that evading copyright laws is easy when you split up a video into several segments, or if you separate the audio from the visuals in a video, but what Girl Talk teaches us is that neither we nor he are among the first people to create our own work from the works of others. Everything we make into our own work is the sum of our life experiences, and it would be utter insanity to say that we cannot make art based off of things that influence us, when we are advised to make decisions every day based on our past experiences and what we have learned from them. It is only human nature to take everything we encounter and, based on how strongly we feel about each individual material, to bring forth our experiences to varying degrees in everything we do. As we did in our videos, Girl Talk takes what is rightfully the property of others and dodges copyright laws by mashing and mixing and reusing that property to create something totally different, and, maybe in his mind, to send a message to the listener of his music. 

I could tell from the beginning of the movie that it was very relevant to this class, especially on the topic of copyright. The beginning of the movie begins by introducing Girl Talk, whose music consists entirely of remixes and mashups. I am actually a big fan of Girl Talk and have seen him live several times. I legitimately believe that his music is its own works, and should not be considered copyright infringement. He talks about this issue and the "war" he seems to have started from 0:00-1:30. We saw this issue come up with Duncan's Twitter video, as it was taken down from YouTube because of a copyright issue. The difference between Girl Talk's music and Duncan's video, in my opinion, is that there is significant change to the original works. If there is not a significant change done to the original work, then there is not enough creativity to claim that there is not copyright infringement.