Pros and cons of copyright law
Copyright law has been around since the 1790s and has been being updated and changed ever since then, although in the modern era its hard to keep up with all the changes in media and its use especially in remix and parody culture. its a very good way to ensure an artist or creators original work is kept safe from being stolen and claimed by someone who didn’t make it and allowing others to share content and keep track of who created it although id say that this power has been abused on the internet to the full extent. see, i don’t think you can use these old and outdated methods to judge the new content boom on the internet and copyright infringement has been used as a bullying tactic by large corporations on the internet to stamp out completely innocent creators even if the original creator is credited, thus not allowing the content to spread naturally rather in a cold, corporate way with ad campaigns and such.
i think it’s pretty hypocritical of the companies and record labels, especially with music and art because a lot of the time corporations take credit for what an artist has made, effectively meaning these business executives that only care about money take all credit and royalties. take the current state of youtube for example, the copyright infringement detectors are most of the time automatic and don’t always work for fair use and even when an infringement claim is made by a real person its not always justified again because of fair use because claims can be made by anyone and if the corperation is big (nintendo for example) youtube wont even question if its fair use or not because they don’t want to lose a sponsor and ad revenue. theyve even gone so far as to demonetise videos if it steps outside of ‘advertiser freindly content
in summary for all the good it does for honest and original creators there is a real danger copyright could be abused and used as a tool for corporate censorship.
Is it possible to make anything new?
In this day and age, you’d think its impossible to make anything new, that every idea has been exhausted and that if you show even a shred of influence of another’s work you will be condemned for it and have your work declared a rip off of an original property.
the truth is its not that were running out of ideas, its just that with our internet age connectivity we’re seeing a very large volume of creative works across all forms of media and discussing and interpreting them in hundreds of ways every day and sharing information and creative works instantaneously and with all that in mind its only natural we’d start to see algorithms and clear signs of influence even in original works. this is not a bad thing though, because creative ideas actually rely on influence and shared information, inspiration can come from just about any source after all. one idea from one source leads to influencing another creative idea to be fed to another source and so on and i’d argue that our vastly increased connectivity has allowed us to create and innovate more than we ever have before.
in conclusion, its entirely possible to make new things even if it means building on whats come before, no matter how far fetched it is there will always be a new and original idea out there, you just have to go to the length of finding it.
Bibliography
-Riverhead Books (2010). WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM by Steven Johnson. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].
-UK copyright Service. (2017). [online] Available at: https://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p01_uk_copyright_law [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].
-Youtube copyright system. (2017). [image] Available at: https://harkeraquila.com/29864/opinion/youtubes-corporate-copyright-censorship-system/ [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].