Comments on Smith and Jenkins Lectures:

After hearing what Mr. Smith and Ms. Jenkins have to say about intellectual property and copyright law, I have come to the conclusion that copyright laws are so strict toward protecting the rights of current intellectual property owners that digital creativity is being stifled in the rest of us. Because IP owners have so much control over where their content is used, copied, and extended upon, most people are afraid to be creative for the fear that they will infringe on content someone has already copyrighted. Because so many ideas are copyrighted, it is hard to create unless you want to work from complete scratch on something, or want to track down whether what you want to extend is in the public domain, and if it is not, track down who owns it and ask permission. Both of these directions can be a long and arduous process, so many people choose simply to not even attempt to create because they don't want to deal with these complexities. Also, people who aren't aware of these complications and do create something that includes someone else's copyrighted content either get sued or have their content destroyed if the person who copyrighted it didn't approve it. This sadness someone feels after something they worked on for such a long time is destroyed is more than enough to deter the person from ever trying to create something unique again.

This is evident in the movie "Be Kind Rewind," where people create parodies of popular movies without permission, and end up having countless hours of work completely and utterly destroyed. I have also had this happen to me, personally. My senior year in high school, I decided to create a highlight tape for my high school wrestling team. I video taped it, edited it, and put it together myself. Then, to top it off, I put it to music -- specifically the song "Click, click, boom" by Saliva. Proud of my work, I posted it on Facebook. A week later, I received an email from Facebook saying they had removed my content because it infringed on copyrighted material -- the music was copyrighted. I was very distraught that after all my hard work, I couldn't show it to my friends and family.

However, I didn't give up. I posted my video on Youtube. Youtube has made a deal with iTunes to handle copyrighted content a different way. My video is allowed to remain on Youtube as long as there is an advertisement in the video to buy the copyrighted music I used. While I was able to publish my video, it was still frustrating that I pretty much didn't have any rights over the property I created to choose whether the ad displays or not. Even though the music is someone else's, I created all the video on my own, and it is my creative property. But in order to show it to the world, I had to give up my rights to it because someone had already copyrighted the music. This was especially annoying because there ws no goal to make money off this, I was simply a harmless high-schooler who wanted to show what I had made to the world. Because of how frustrating the whole process of publishing my work was, I am now much more hesitant to begin any more creative projects for fear that I will lose my rights over them, or they will not be viewable at all because they partly infringe on someone else's copyright. The video is viewable here, the ad can be scene 10 seconds in.