Monday, September 23, 2013

Copyright Law: Black and White, with Shades of Uncertainty

The Debate
Copyright law is a form of "intellectual property" that allows for artists, authors and any individual with an idea to protect it, redistribute it and in many cases, make a profit from it. This makes an individual's work a sort of tangible mean of expression. Copyright is also said to incentivize creativity. Currently, Copyright is an evolving  form of law in today's judicial system. When a person breaks copyright law, it is called copyright infringement. Not to be confused with plagerism, copyright infringement is taking or copying something without paying for it sufficiently, whereas plagerism is claiming authorship of a work that is not your own. There are many debates on whether or not something is technically not your own. One of the most interesting debates in this area is whether or not an artist doing a song cover of another artist is technically considered copyright infringement. So many up and coming artists become known through recreating or doing a take on a song created by someone else.  Personally, I feel that information, art, and music are things that should be shared and recreated. I don't think torrenting music is the answer, but I would not consider a cover copyright infringement either. We must be able to find a happy medium to appreciate music and art without harming the creator in any way.

Copyright Quiz
Q:An elementary school transcribes the lyrics from the album "Cats" and puts it on as the school mini-musical. A teacher plays the music by ear on the piano and the students perform every song. There is no admission charge. This is legal.
A: False.
I was suprised to find out that schools cant use media or re-enact plays without the permission of the owner. Mistakenly, I considered this to be "fair use" but apparantly in this situation it isnt. 

Creative Commons License

Copyright: Shades of Uncertainty by Hayley Sayrs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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