– What do you see as the positives and negatives around copyright?

The copyright system is one that allows people to complete and total ownership over their intellectual property, which is fair as it’s something you made so you should have control over it. The .gov.uk page on copyright states that “Copyright protects your work and stops others from using it without your permission.” Which is fantastic for the creators as it means that their work can’t be used, copied, distributed, adapted or even put on the internet without their expressed permission. The problem with having all this copyright protection it does make content hard to share, which I know is contradictory because surely you don’t want your intellectual property to be shared, that defeats the point. But from the point of view of a small-time artist or writer, sharing is one of the only ways to get their work out there to an audience and if their work does get copied or used without permission then there is little they can do about it as taking copyright infringement to court is expensive which not a lot of smaller time creators can afford.

– Is it possible to make anything new?

Yes, but that’s somewhat down to what your definition of new is. To explain my statement, imagine a robot made up of part of old robots, no part comes from the same robot, but they are all put together to make this new robot. Though the robot is made from parts of previous robot designs, it is still something new because the parts have been repurposed and put together in a different way giving a different look and feel, that is what I mean with my statement. One can argue that nothing can ever be new, and in some aspect yes, that is true because everything has already been done before but it’s taking what has already been done and working it with other ideas, other concepts to form something new. There will always be something similar to what you produce, but that does not mean that what you’ve made isn’t new, or what the other person may have made isn’t new, there’s just some similarities and that’s okay.

How copyright protects your work -GOV.UK [online] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/copyright [Accessed 6 December 2017]