Showing posts with label Vox Article. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vox Article. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Who Should Own Creative Content?

Something that the combination of this BAD uncut film and the Vox article "This is the best version of Star Wars--and watching it is a crime" got me thinking, is who has a right to create something, contribute to it, and benefit from it? My first reaction to watching Star Wars uncut was that it was horrible, and there is such a thing as giving fans too much power in fandoms. In the past, some films or television shows have listened too heavily to fan theories and input, and have sacrificed the integrity of said media entirely. But on the opposite end, some creators have completely gone overboard and ruined their own creative work in certain ways--for example, George Lucas in the case of adding in terrible CGI to the original Star Wars and other terrible additions he made, and JK Rowling tweeting unnecessary additions to the Harry Potter world that none of us asked for (also for her blatant transphobic tweets...but that's another issue entirely). I'm all for world-building, but these extraneous circumstances are completely unnecessary! My first reaction is that someone should limit Lucas' control over the original films and I'm glad Rowling has no power over any of the HP films, but then as a writer...I would want all creative control and ownership over my work that I created! The Vox article accurately talked about how out of control copyright laws are, so my question is...

Should copyright control be limited to the creators of said creative work? If so, what does that look like?



Monday, February 3, 2020

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.