Comment for Melanie Hughes Blog 6

I agree with your thoughts on "Copyright Criminals" because I too was very confused. Just as you stated people have been quoting or paraphrasing other peoples writing for many years with only needing to cite their sources. Then after watching the movie I was blown away at the idea of how much people asked for using a few seconds of a song. The movie and that thought got me thinking about how much of my work has been influenced in someway by other people's work. I never use the exact same thing as another work, but I may take an idea from it and use it. The more I thought about it I wondered am I truly taking someone's personal property and then re-purposing it just as the people in the movie did with sound? Most art created today can most likely be related to earlier pieces even though he or she may not have seen the previous work before. They may have thought that what he or she did was something completely original only to have that idea crushed. I remember one time in high school where I was accused of plagiarism because a paragraph  in a paper I wrote was very close to another paragraph, used in a paper done for the same class a few years before. I had no idea who the student was or even that they wrote about the same topic. I avoided trouble because the teacher saw that when he said from who and saw the confusion in my eyes that I probably just happen to think the same way the other person did. I am sure that the teacher realizing I wasn't even in this state nor went to school the same year as the other person helped. Yet the idea of how easy it is to use a simple citation in a paper compared to using a few seconds of a song still confuses me.

Lessig

The main idea that I can understand the best, is the idea of remixing something into your own creation. In the book Lessig states "Creators here and everywhere are always and at all times building upon the creativity that went before and that surrounds them now." This statement is completely true due to almost anything that is created now can be correlated to something in the past. I am no different I have pulled inspiration for some of my graphic designs from either other designs or concepts. I may not use the entirety of the design, but I am still technically taking their idea without permission. This is not something that is new and can be seen everywhere. When I was younger I never really understood the idea till I took a DTC class in college. The main focus of the class was not about piracy or remixing, but there was a single day where we went over the topic. The teacher showed us a video someone created about how the movie "Kill Bill" had several ideas that were used before. Ranging from the yellow jumpsuit to the time in the movie where she chops a woman's arm off. This caught my attention immediately and I started to think of other great scenes from movies or games that I liked that may have been used before. Lessig talks about how Disney used ideas that were already done well before, but simply re-imagined the ideas for a new era. That they also took many ideas from the culture around the world and changed the story from a dark demeanor to a light one. Eventhough, Disney did this they are not the only ones. The stories that Disney used were from "The Brother's Grimm" which in turn were not their own stories either. I agree with how Lessig talks about how the laws that are used against piracy and copyright could use some redoing due to several of the issues Lessig stated.

Blog 4

The quote by Marshall Mcluhan "the medium is the message" makes much more sense to me now after the last class because of the demonstrations with the waveforms and videos. I never really thought about how one sees information as giving a meaning. Then the little demonstration given in class with the wave forms and the videos made things click more in my head. By telling us what each song meant to Dr. Edwards we were not able to understand what the songs were or sounded like the way he did. Then we were shown the songs waveforms which with the previous information gave us a little more meaning behind what they make sound like. Finally by having us listen to the songs themselves were we able to understand why the waveforms looked the way they did and also why they meant what they did to Dr. Edwards. This showed that even though we saw the same thing in two forms (the waveform and listening to it) each provided us with a different meaning of the information. The first only allowed us to guess on how the songs may sound while the other gave us how they sound, the beats, the words in the songs and much more. Yet both in a certain way had the same information even if all that was missing was that the waveform was not in the greatest detail for us or a program to analyze. Had we heard the songs in Audacity some may have known what they were. Though the video of the second song (gangnam style) provided us with even more information than just the music could. We could have not gotten the same meaning from the sound alone. This is definitely a way that the quote "the medium is the message" has been proven correct.