Week 10
Copyright
How do you acquire property without taking it by force? One example from class was that you could trade for it. You acquired property by mixing labor with earth- classic answer comes from John Locke, in the treatise on government. What about ideas? Are they an example of mixing one’s labor with the earth? I think yes, because we are laboring (thinking) and coming up with a plan or proposition. Dominant forms of intellectual property include patents, trademarks, and copy rights. Unlike patents and copyrights, trademarks do not expire after a set term of years. After it has expired, it’ll become public domain. First US copyright act was in 1790, the term was 14 years and renewable for 14 years in author was still alive. We learned terms like corporation which is a fictitious person. A corporation can sign contracts, own land, pay wages, hire and fire, and testify in court. We want to create corporations, so we can sell shares of the corporation; this is how stocks work. It is a disembodied, immortal being. Corporation can own intellectual property. We saw the copyright duration and the mickey mouse curve.
– The case for extension of copyright intellectual property is property- is does not matter who made it, it matters who own it.
– The case against extension of copyright intellectual property is not physical property perpetual ownership of intellectual property retards innovation chokes creativity and enclosed our common heritage.
Disney profited from public domain sources and recreated movies such as The Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Chicken Little and Mulan.
I believe there are other organizations that are also profiting from public domains like these movies. For example, CW has created a show called Once Upon a Time, where princesses like Belle from The Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Mulan among others come to live. These organizations are obviously protecting themselves legally a they must have copyrights and lawyers assessing them.
Copyright sampling and Hip Hop
We watched YouTube videos showing different singers like Chuck and Loui sampling, also Diddy taking sounds and lyrics from The Police. While doing my digital scavenger hunt, I noticed that Cardi B used “I like it like that” chorus by Pete Rodriguez.
There are two kinds of sampling; digital audio which is grabbing a small piece of music and putting it in another song. By the late 1980s “digital samples” had become more affordable. We also watched a few videos of Djs doing table turns, which I found to be so hard and interesting as the sounds/rhythm changed. It was a way of making music from scratch, which is not as common now a days as the majority of artists used technology to make their hits.