I've made a blog about things internet related with my own flavor and outlook. I try to keep things interesting and fun. A lot of my blogs are about things we talk about every day. I encourage you to take a look.
It has been steadily getting more real to me that the semester is ending and my blogging on all things internet related will soon be over. I really did not think it would be this hard, but it will take some serious weekly therapy and paired with heavy drinking to mask the pain. Without the task of two blogs by Sunday at midnight my life will simply appear empty ad meaningless. It is true what they say... "you don't know what you have till it's gone." I really didn't know the joy that blogging on Tim Berners Lee and the affects of Twitter on young adults would bring me, but... here I am. I've truly grown as a person with this blog. I remember the days when I didn't know how to embed a video... ha I was just in the infancy of my blogging years. And then when I finally learned how to make a link work correctly... those were some of the best days of my short blog life. To all my fans in Malaysia, where most of my blog views have come from, thank you... you guys are what keeps me going.
To all the new bloggers out there the little advice I can give you is to never give up...keep on top of yo blog homie! Love the blog life you live. Blog you, baby girl, what you like! I would have to say that the peak of my fame was on Sunday, October 6, 2013...a day that will live in infamy! I got two comments and nine views on my blog post of about movie Her! Moral of the story, go see that movie.... and blog about stuff people like talking about. No one likes to read dry blog posts they wanna read about stuff that interests them...not the stuff that makes them pound their head on the space bar in boredom. Follow the assignments, but add your own little flava to it! You got this!
And for now I will let my girl Whitney take it away...
A World of Reposting,
Sharing, and… Copy Right Protection?
We live in a world
where information, pictures, and videos can be shared at the click of a button.
This is a world where things are liked, reposted, and favorited minutes after
uploaded. We live in a world where private is a dirty word and where all our
information is public. Our world is one where a single person’s intellectual
information can reach thousands. One would think this would think this is a
great world we’re living in, and it is, but there this growing idea that our
intellectual information needs protection. Sometimes there is too much
protection and the rest of the world cannot benefit from our ideas. That is
where Creative Commons comes in. It is a non-profit organization working to find
a balance in-between strict copy right laws and free public use. Creative Commons
is fast growing and used by some of the most widely known companies today. Its
easy to understand licenses make the organization also accessible to the common
individual and I believe its share-alike license is one that we should model
many more copy right licenses after.
The
Creative Commons organization was founded in 2001, but the first set of copy
right licenses weren’t released until December 2002. The organization was
founded by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred with the help of
Center for the Public Domain (Creative Commons Wikipedia). It is now run by a
board of directors and composed of entrepreneurs, experts, philanthropists, and
legal scholars to name a few (History- Creative Commons). Molly Shaffer Van
Houweling, Glenn Otis Brown, Neeru Paharia, and Ben Adida were some of the
people responsible for developing the licenses and infrastructure of Creative
Commons early on (Creative Commons Wikipedia). In 2003 there were approximately
one million licenses under Creative Commons and by 2008 it was estimated that
Creative Commons held 130 million licenses under their name (History- Creative
Commons). It is an organization that grew quickly and is still growing to this
day. Their licenses have been greatly improved upon and imported to over 50
jurisdictions (History- Creative Commons).
The
purpose of the Creative Commons is basically for individuals or companies to
choose how much or how little of their intellectually information that they
want under copy right. This is an alternative to the broad “all rights
reserved”. Creative Commons allows the licensor to keep their copy right, but
grant the public the right to share, copy, and use their work non-commercially
(About the Licenses). This organization works alongside the copy right to allow
licensors to “decide how they want their work to be used” (About the Licenses).
Creative Commons is somewhat limited though. The licenses do not influence the
freedoms given by the law to the users of creative works. Creative Commons
depends on the permission from the licensor to allow the user to do anything
that the law reserves exclusively to the licensor (About the Licenses). CC
cannot go around the law, but it can help to bridge the strict copy right laws
with a license that is more lenient. The video below explains how CC allows us to make a choice about how we want to share our work.
A
Creative Commons copy right license comes in a three layer design. The first is
called the “Legal Code”. This is “in the
kind of language and text formats most lawyers know and love” (About the
Licenses). Unfortunately, the normal person does not understand this; for that
the organization includes the Common Deeds layer. This layer summarizes the
most important items within the contract in ways that people can understand.
The last layer is in a format easy for the machine to read. This is the layer
that allows software systems and search engines to understand. This three layer
system insures that the license is “something that the creators of works can
understand, their users can understand, and even the Web itself can understand”
(About the Licenses).
A
few of the big users of Creative Commons are Al Jazeera, Flickr, and Google.
Jazeera used CC so that they could post footage of the Israeli/Palestine
conflict. Most Western Media did not have the access that Al Jazeera had (Who
Uses CC?). Their footage was then more effective and eye-opening and now users
can freely use it as long as they give permission to Al Jazeera. The link below shows a video that explains Al Jazeera's inspiration by Lessig to make their content open to the public with CC. Flickr also
has a Creative Commons License so that their users can upload and share other users’
images. There are now over 200 million users, making Flickr the largest amount
of licensed content (Who Uses CC?). Google uses CC in a variety of ways, one
being that they allow their users to CC-license their own work through them.
Also, YouTube, which is owned by Google, has added a CC licensing option for
video uploads (Who Uses CC?). This shows that a lot of well-known companies use
CC and for a variety of different reasons, but overall to balance the amount of
control the public has over their intellectual property.
Creative
Commons has many types of licenses such as attribution, non-comercial, and no
derivative works, but the one I fine most accessible is share-alike. According
the Creative Commons website under this license you are allowed to, “share,
copy, and redistribute the material in any medium or format, as well as adapt,
remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even
commercially”(Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic). The user must give credit to
the creator though. They must also give a link to the license agreement and
express if any changes have been made. Also, if the user makes any changes they
must put up their work under the same conditions/license as the original
creator (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic). In summary the user can use the
creators work in any way they choose as long as they give credit and allow
others to use their newly created work in the same way. Personally I feel this
is the fairest license. This allows the creator to keep their copy right
because they still get credit for their work, but also allows others to benefit
from their work. This copy right enables users the share the creators work, but
requires them to let others to freely use their work as well. I feel this is
basically how our internet works today and is the most familiar template for
the public to work off of.
We live in a world
where mass amounts of information, videos, and pictures are at our fingertips.
This is a world where people can popularize their ideas with the touch of the
upload button. We live in a world where copyright is a dirty word and sharing
is preferred. We live in a world where we want our ideas to be known and used,
but also protected. Creative Commons allows this once paradox to become a
possibility. Many companies, organizations, and individuals take advantage of
CC’s easy to understand, flexible version of copyright. Creative Commons is
helping us toward a world that allows the mass circulation of ideas to be
shared, used, and built upon, while still keeping copy rights. This is truly
the best of both worlds!
Pinterest is a website that makes us believe we can do anything ourselves. We honestly feel guilty for throwing away a toilet paper roll because Pinterest makes us believe we can DIY into something beautiful. We Pinterest how to decorate for fall and how to make the perfect pumpkin pie and just because you found your outfit on Pinterest three of your friends just might have the exact same one. Pinterest has actually become a verb! "I should just Pinterest that!" "I'm going to Pinterest how to make chicken casserole." This is just one of the many ways technology is affecting our culture and how much influence does Pinterest have on our culture. Sense the people pick what they pin is it us that decides what it popular and what is not?
To also talk about using parts from movies/songs and making them your own...
This is a mash up of the mean girls trailer and Disney clips that became very popular on YouTube. In the documentary we watched last class Disney was very strict on how others used their intellectual property. This mash up definitely does not represent the values of Disney. The producer of this video is not using this for profit, but they did put it in the eye of the public. Could this be another law suit.
In honor of the mash ups we have been talking about in class lately...
If anyone has heard of Time Flies, they have made a career out of mash ups/covers and putting their songs on YouTube. They recently had a concert in Raleigh which a lot of my friends went to, I was very tempted to buy a ticket. I am a big fan on him and I often listens to his mash ups of songs I wouldn't even normally listen to. Why is this? Because the songs really don't sound they same. I would say that this isn't really isn't a copy right infringement. What do you guys think?
The above link talks about how Facebook has become a teenage wasteland. The article talks about how facebook will be around for a long time, but it is slowly becoming uncool because people's parents and grandparents are getting on it. They make a very interesting comparison to facebook and a night club. Kids like it when all the cool kids are there and all their friends, but then when all the uncool kids and their parents show up they start to leave. There is a news report and interviews from young teens from Britain with lovely accents! It's a good watch if your interested!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57610536-71/trucker-said-viewing-women-on-facebook-at-time-of-fatal-crash/
A truck driver crashed into a police car while on his phone looking at women on facebook. This happened in May, but just now became public. Thankfully the police car was empty so no one in the other car was hurt. The above link contains the website that reports the story and a video of everything that happened. With the man being a truck driver, is probably a very good driver, which goes to show that one is above the texting and driving law no matter how good of a driver they are. This video put into perceptive for me that technology should not put other people's lives in danger!
