I don’t hate blogging, but I do hate the fact that random people or bots or Russians are trying to comment on my posts. I keep marking them as spam, but it’s super annoying to wake up to emails everyday telling me people are commenting on my posts. I guess I could look to see if there’s a way to set it up so that people can’t comment. Super annoying.
This week was weird. We started off on Monday talking about how it is possible to acquire property without taking it by force. According to John Locke, if you “mix your labor” with the land, you own it. He wanted to moralize the English occupation of North America by saying they came in a farmed and stuff, so the land is theirs…as if Native Americans were surviving without doing anything to the land…yeah, uh huh. So, a deer can’t own property because it goes around eating the plants and drinking the water, but it’s not putting the plants there or building something out of a tree.
As far as intellectual property rights go, are ideas property? When do they become property? There are patents, trademarks, and copyrights – none of which I fully understood, and I still don’t, but I’m a lot more knowledgeable than I was before. Why is there a limited term on these? If it lasts forever, the future generations getting royalties are not laboring for those payments. Also, the public good thing. And the fact that it can be made better or competitors can come in and lower the market price for the consumer.
What is a corporation? A legal person. It’s a fictitious legal person. It’s a disembodied legal person. Super strange, but crucial to the American economy. Then there are holding corporations, which is a corporation that can own other corporations. Which is funny because people can’t own other people. I think this is like that chart that shows that like literally ever corporation in America is owned by a total of like 8 holding corporations. Everyone has seen that chart. You know, like Dasani is a corporation and so is Minute Maid, but they’re both owned by Coca-Cola. And isn’t Coca-Cola owned by someone? Maybe it’s one of the actual big ones.
Should intellectual property copyrights be extended? The Mickey Mouse Curve keeps the extension going. When it gets close to falling out of copyright, Disney goes to lobby Congress to extend it. On one hand, intellectual property is property – it doesn’t matter who made it, it matters who owns it. No one tells you how long you can live in your dead grandma’s house, why should intellectual property be any different? On the other hand, intellectual property is not physical property. Perpetual ownership of intellectual property retards innovation, chokes creativity and encloses our common heritage. Think “Happy Birthday” (the song). If you copyright that, part of our common culture goes away because we have to pay money to sing it to our mom.
What I thought was cool was that Disney used a ton of sources that were out of copyright to create a story to make a movie. Then they made billions of dollars. I actually think this is cool. It creates something fun and accessible to a group of people who might not ordinarily run into that piece of work. Like Mulan. I study Chinese history, literature, language, and culture. In my literature course this semester, we read the poem. Then Disney made a movie out of it and brought attention to the story of this brave young girl who did something amazing for her family and country by fighting in the army. I was exposed to this story at a young age and now I’ve been able to read the original source and appreciate it in a different way because film brought me to it first. So I guess I’m against extension of copyrights because it prohibits creativity and new content or content in different forms.
Wednesday was all about sampling. Sampling is interesting and I think that many people who would be in favor of copyright extension would be against free sampling. I think those in favor of copyright deadlines and intellectual property becoming a public good at some point would be in favor of free sampling. I think it’s fine. I guess there have to be regulations at some point. It can’t be the SAME EXACT song with the lyrics changed. I don’t know where or how to draw that line though, but I do know that I think sampling allows us to gain something new from a piece of work that already exists.
We listened to “Hotline Bling” by Drake and heard “Why Can’t we Live Together” by Timmy Thomas. Or Cardi B’s “I Like It” from some other song I can’t remember. I heard that one immediately when I hear “I Like It” for the first time (although I couldn’t name the exact title or artist, I knew I had heard it and that it was sampled).
We talked about how artists use turn tables to do cross-fading and sampling. It’s pretty awesome and I’m jealous of the artists who do this and make it look so easy. By the late 1980s we see digital samplers like the E-mu SP1200 become affordable for many and makes sampling easier.
Then there was this law suit about FUNKADELIC’s song being sampled in the N.W.A. song. I didn’t hear it at all, but then we watched the explanation video and I hear it well. There was this whole thing about how this is not de minimis – not too trivial to be considered. If you ask me, this is the most minimis, but it’s not my decision. It’s a siren, people. It became law that if you sample, you have to pay. Does this enclose creativity? Now an ordinary person cannot afford to license it and use it…is something lost there? Should they just have to create something completely original? Does original even exist anymore?
By sampling, we can re-purpose old art and show it in a new way. Maybe that will even encourage people to see where it came from and appreciate that too. And if it doesn’t, so what? The people appreciate what was made and I think that’s great.
-Jessi Russell