Copyright is kind of terrifying

“The ridiculous thing about the situation isn't that Lucas doesn't want to make the cut of the film that I want to watch. It's that it was illegal for Harmy to make it. And it was illegal for me to download it. And it would be illegal for me to make it available for download from Vox.com or even to put a link on this page that would let you go get it. It's illegal because of how Congress has over the years extended and expanded the scope of copyright law in ways that have become perverse and destructive to human culture.”

This quote from the Vox article brought me back to the final chapter of the film “Everything is a Remix” and reminded me of a question Dr. MB posed to the class at the end of that day; why do we reward originality? what is so special about originality? Of course, originality exhibits creativity, which is a favorable characteristic, but some things that aren’t considered ‘original’ also display aspects of originality, aka the crowdsourced Star Wars. Because of our copyright laws, we could be stripped of this creativity in any moment, and that is very scary to me.