Intellectual 1’s and 0’s. On The Virtual 1’s and 2’s.
February 17, 2008
This week the readings from class deal with intellectual property, so it’s kind of ironic that I just watched this documentary on the Metrolink for the hour trip from Upland to Union Station this week. The 60 minute documentary Good Copy Bad Copy, is about intellectual property, copyright and music culture as it relates to the digital age. The documentary is great because it takes interviews from different members of the music/movie industry, academics, and more as they provide their perspective on new media. What interested me most from this documentary (and related to our readings) was Lawrence Lessig’s interview, and his stance on digital copyright. While Lessig agrees that copyright is necessary and can’t be overlooked in the digital sense, he argues that it is important to keep the creativity for digital work alive by allowing users the freedom to manipulate and use digital material in it’s own context. This argument is the reason why the Creative Commons exists, for a brief summary, view this pdf.
The Creative Commons is important because it allows the creators of content to assign specific freedoms to their intellectual property that would be immediately applicable in their digital form. Flickr takes a proactive approach with the photos that its users upload by letting them attach a Creative Commons license to any photo uploaded to their site. All photos with the CC license can be viewed here.
While I don’t have Creative Commons enabled on my own Flickr, the fact that I can more easily share my photography with others and allow them to more creatively use it with my permission is great. I haven’t given much thought about it, but after the readings this week, I feel like I need to share my work with others in the same way I hope their work can be shared with me.
Getting back to the documentary… it’s clear that the ability to manipulate, develop, and create brand new content from existing musical releases is becoming easier, but it’s also allowing for more innovative and more interesting work. I can remember back in high school, about 9 years ago as a freshman, I was really involved in the whole digital-remixing phase long before it reached the ubiquitous nature of today with products like Scratch Live that most aspiring DJs use (interesting/controversial because it allows DJs to manipulate their digital copies of music on real turntables), and the ones that are solely on the computer (plenty are listed in the ArsTechnica article).
As an avid user of Virtual Turntables back in the day (yes I did use it on Windows 98, we go way back), I was inspired by a friend of mine who lived next door to me. With the power of the internet, a computer, and CDs ready to rip to my computer, I was ready to start a revolution (or so I thought). Night after night, I perfected my craft, I even made a few remixes that I posted to message boards. Thinking about it now I’d love to go back and listen to what I was putting together, but I have to find my old windows desktop… But to think, the power of what I had, what eventually would take place, I couldn’t even imagine… but I did find an old screenshot of the software
[UPDATED] After all of this, if you feel intrigued this school/work day off, you can stream the whole Good Copy Bad Copy documentary on Google Video blip.tv. Watch it embedded below:
