1. Rife begins her paper with examples of certain educational
institutions, including students, being attacked on account of unintentional
copyright or plagiarism issues. Certainly, if a student is afraid of
repercussions they may switch up their piece to a degree that could radically
alter it. On the other hand, at least I personally tended to steal first
(particularly when I needed background music for certain projects) and ask
questions later, and nothing ever came from it. I suppose what I want to ask
here is: how much do you think copyright and the lack of knowledge about the
rules really affects students and their projects? Do they tend to find an
alternate, acceptable route? Do they tend to ignore the rules and run with it?
Or do they really avoid things out of fear?
2. A question that arises particularly from the Girl Talk portion of Lessig's article is: how do we determine when you've created something original and new? Even if made out of other people's work, I would argue that Girl Talk's work is nothing like theirs because he puts it in an entirely different context and by combining them gives the songs a completely different meaning. My question here is, what do you guys think is enough for sufficient newness (for lack of a better term) in a piece? And how can we determine that our students have written something that is original enough to be considered theirs even when utilizing other people's work?
In answering the second question, I think the biggest issue comes down to postmodernism in our culture. What I mean is that the very point of postmodernism is to take the known and create something new in reference to the old while making a comment on it. It creates a conversation in some way, whether it simply be to poke fun at the pomp and circumstance of something traditional (think the Simpsons parodying Poe's The Raven) or truly asking for you to address arbitrary taboos in our culture (artists who recreate the Last Supper with nudes or women or something along those lines to question "decency" and the patriarchy). Now the tricky part-- how does this trickle into the classroom and when is it appropriate? I personally feel that Lessig is addressing artistic license in the Intro to Remix, and in this case, do we consider academic papers on the same level as forms of art like music and visual media? Where do we draw the line between plagarism and remixing for classroom projects? I think it's very obvious for written composition papers where the lines of remixing and plagiarism exist, but I can imagine that determining these lines in digital media will become much more difficult. I think it also begs the question-- can all intellectual property (writing, music, visual art) truly be treated equally?
ReplyDeleteAlso, when I talk about postmodernism, I am meaning to reference how taking a well known song and remixing it is more along the lines of postmodernism than a college composition class's research project.
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