media analysis

How are we supposed to have a cultured free future when we can’t shake off the control of the past? The past is keeping control of everything and limiting what we can use for our own creations using bits of other works. People that do remixing, photo editing, collages and sampling are limited what they can do and are all “breaking the law”. It’s copyright law or if u break it it’s copyright infringement. The movie was bias, it only showed the ‘peoples’ side of the argument and never flipped it to see the other side. It was all about how copyright law is stupidly constructed.

The filmmaker makes us mad at copyright laws by showing us Girl-talk's music until about half way through then saying that because of copyright law he can only show us enough to get his point across by invoking the freedom of speech policy. After that he changes to a classical music but continues to show that it was an amazing concert but we can’t hear any of it. There was a tone of conflict shown between teens downloading music and the laws against it. Even when Radio-head free-lanced and released an album on YouTube for the people to remix and recreate, someone who posted his recreation got a letter from Radio-head publishers stating that he owed a lot of money for using the album. This is one way we were showed that copyright law is constructed badly. Even though the publishers had absolutely nothing to do with the release and creation of the album, because Radio-head signed a contract the publishers basically own them. Also a man got sued for drawing steam boat Willy (aka Mickey Mouse) and putting out a comic book. He was then told that he could never draw Mickey Mouse again. But my question is if Disney is going to publish and distribute a how to draw Mickey Mouse book how can they tell us we can’t draw him?

All in all personally I think that copy right law is a good thing but it needs to have some serious tweaking done to it. Yes it is protecting the original creations of the artists, but it’s also limiting the creativity of regular people. For example if I happen to be mega rich and get some good layers I could draw and copyright a sun then no one would be able to draw a sun. To me that seems kind of stupid. What would kindergarteners draw in the back ground of their pictures? What are your opinions on this topic? Leave me a comment is copy right law good or bad?