Copyright
Copyright has been an immensely beneficial piece of legislature that has protected and promoted the personal rights of innovations for the last few centuries, allowing individuals to own the rights to their own products, instead of those rights falling under the absolute control of a ruling monarch or class. Copyright has allowed individuals to build themselves up from nothing, opening the gates to a higher level of living, instead of that level being restricted to those individuals born into it. It also, as mentioned before, has promoted the innovation by decreeing that said innovations will not be taken from the innovator, but will be theirs for either their life, or a certain period of time.
Copyright has had a number of setbacks however, as individuals have found numerous loopholes through the legislature, allowing them to begin and continue using dirty business practices in order to take control of certain copyrighted pieces of work and take them as their own through law, as well as attempt to claim the copyright for a number of trivial things for example the FineBrothers from the website Youtube attempted to copyright the word “React” in order to protect their own video format in the early months of 2016. I think it’s impossible to stop these kind of practices in their entirety without contradicting the legislature itself, thus is has become just another fact of life that individuals need to be careful when it comes to copyright and copyright law.
When it comes to making something original,I mentioned in my Avant Garde piece that everything comes from something and nothing comes from nothing; it is difficult to make something truly unique in its own right, however I believe it is possible to make something different, in a sense. If copyright law had been developed to be more stringent, that only the unique and completely different would be allowed through, the world would be a very different place. Ideas have to come from somewhere, whether they’re from a book, a piece of art or a movie, to penalise an individual for that is wrong in my eyes. So in my eyes, in the strictest sense of the term, no it is not possible to make something truly new in terms of the games industry of other types of media.
Chris Foxx. (1 February 2016). Fine Brothers spark fury with YouTube trademark attempt. Available: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35459805. Last accessed 7/12/17.