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.