Assignment Screencast

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zD3gpG9TTw

Web Assignment 2

Occupy the Media Stream

            In the past few weeks its been hard to ignore this growing force across the United States known as #OccupyWallstreet. A group of protestors that have lived at Liberty Square for nearly the last month are protesting the 1% of Americans that have 45% of the wealth and the government standing by or helping those 1% to maintain their wealth. Its funny to think that Ad Busters the Canadian organization that started the protest started with no more than 200 and has grown to the multiple thousands that now participate in their daily marches on Wall Street and the only reason for the massive growth in support is thanks to a social media website that they created to spread their unorganized word. www.occupywallst.org is the grounds for this growth among other social media websites that have been very helpful to this cause. From their use of multiple sites like Youtube and Kickstarter there has been a gray area created as to copyrights in videos and photos that are being used.

            As of now on 10/10/2011 the first thing you see when bringing up the webpage is a video called Sign Language; it’s a montage of videos with people holding signs but this montage of videos is not what would be called to question it’s the backing track. They avoided having to take the video down by avoiding a major web video hosting website like Youtube. Vimeo an alternate to Youtube is not as heavily trafficked by the copyright police who consist of copyright lawyers hunting all day to find people that void copyright laws. This is an example of why like Lessig tells us we should deregulate amateur media, such as remix video’s like this that are harmless to the owner of the original content. Once the content is being sold for profit is where I see the line in the sand. If someone without permission is reselling an artist’s media be it music, still image, or video the resold media is illegal. Though in the case of remixed media it is no longer the same media as it started as therefore it shouldn’t be considered under the same copyright as the original media because it is no longer the same. In the case of the video on the homepage of Occupy Wall Street it would be a remix; the video is from the original creator and the backing track is not the full song so it is no longer the same which shouldn’t violate the copyright of the original song.    

            A more recent possibility of copyright infringement was when Slavoj Zizek spoke to the people at Liberty Square and was taped speaking. Occupy Wall Street posted these videos of Zizek without his permission though Zizek is not one to care about someone posting a public speech that he made but others do. This would be Lessig’s idea of decriminalizing the copy where people would no longer be considered a pirate for sharing a copy of another person’s work as long as it wasn’t money involved in the transaction. Lessig outlines the major flaw in Remix;

If copyright regulates copies, and copying is as common as breathing, then a law that triggers federal regulation on copying is a law that regulates too far.

Instead, Congress should adopt again its historical practice of specifying precisely the kinds of uses of creative work that should be regulated by copyright law.¹² The law should be triggered by uses that are presumptively, or likely to be, commercial uses in competition with the copyright owner’s use. The law should leave unregulated uses that have nothing to do with the kinds of uses the copyright owner needs to control. Copying, in this world, would not itself invoke federal regulation. Public performances, or public distributions, or commercial distribution, would.

This idea leads to abolishing the wrongful law suits that have brought upon so many people because of the major media agencies believing that all non-sold copies that they don’t get money for are as illegal as armed robbery. A re-evaluation of the copyright laws to only include specific commercial use of the material in question would be a much better system than the one that has grown into the media lawsuit monster that it has become.

            The Occupy Wall Street website has become a Mecca for counter-culture literature that will never see a copyright so should these lone writers have the same consideration as writers that have works that have copyrights. These works will remain in the public domain for the remainder of their circulation never to see the lush protection of a copyright; I see this as a good thing, within the realms of counter-culture literature. This allows for each individual piece to evolve as another reader sees fit if they want to modify or edit the original.

SUPER UGLY

http://www.appstate.edu/~dekoningnr/SuperUgly.htm

My Awakening to Endless Knowledge

Who could have thought that there would be an endless supply of knowledge that you can access right at your fingertips almost anywhere in the world? The reasons for families to sit together and talk rightly thrown away along with the need for wood powered heat and using mainframes to talk to other people that need to contact. The internet is to blame and to thank for this being possible. For the current generation it is hard to remember the antiquated time before the internet arrived on the world stage. I remember most of my first experience jumping into this endless labyrinth of knowledge and distractions. I was 8 and my parents had begun preparations for this upcoming unknown called Y2K which now we look back and laugh. The idea that computers wouldn’t turn over their clocks because they hadn’t been told by humans that 2000 was a year and that every computer globally was going to crash is now such a completely ludicrous idea. But this was 1999 and everyone thought the world was going to end because of this malfunction of computers which would lead to the misfiring of nuclear weapons and what tied all of these computers including the ones in our homes together, the internet. I remember the dial tone of a modem as my dad let me on his computer for the first time and set me free on this web of confusion. I started out on his Netscape homepage and somehow managed to find games on the internet in the first 20min and so began my dissension deep into a world I have still yet to figure out.  

                The first thing I noticed at a young age and so did my parents was that as soon as they allowed me to have internet in my room for the first time they saw less of me. This destruction of the nuclear family was partially a result of the internet and holding children’s interest and if their interest changed all they had to do was relocate their attention to another webpage.  Just as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his essay “Fire Worship” about the loss of family times because of the advent of the wood stove so has the internet stretched these family ties and times to new lengths. With the advent of instant messaging and online social networking people don’t need to leave their homes to talk to someone face to face. Along with the brain numbing effects of the television it was a staple in gathering the family in the same place, but no longer is this true with the internet giving us the full and endless access to any television program that we could ever want along with many other shows that are only available on the internet. Though this information highway should not be seen as all bad, for it has given us many helpful websites based on specific interests.

                Youtube for example other than its many funny, crude, rude, or indifferent videos has a plethora of instructional, scientific, political, and many other intellectual videos to stimulate the mind. The internet has made it so that we no longer have to ask living people questions we may ask this inanimate all knowing being called Google any question we want, and if it doesn’t know the answer the answer doesn’t exist or this is how so many people think.  Vannevar Bush a man known for organizing the Manhattan Project published an article in 1945 in The Atlantic Monthly titled “As We May Think” outlining his idea for ease of research among physicists that wouldn’t get to share research with their colleges. Well this has happened now with people being able to share new ideas and research on the internet we will have no use for Mr Bush’s idea of the Memex, we have Wikipedia instead.