A few years back I was a member of an online forum, which was pretty much just a general discussion forum. I had my 15 minutes of fame on that board by being a half-decent photoshopper, creating custom posters and signatures. I found out that people were stealing my creations and claiming them as my own on other forums. To combat this, I did two things; first, I watermarked my work with my tag (“six-one”); second, I created a DeviantArt profile and uploaded my work there first.
The point I’m making here is that someone else saw value in something I created, and due to the ease of copy and paste, stole my ideas and creations to claim them as their own. Lessig says that we live in a world that celebrates property, and there is a new “weird” form of property, legally known as “intellectual property”. This is quite literally, the legal protection of the ideas that come out of our head. As soon as you put pen to paper, click a button or voice you’re idea, it’s yours forever…so long as you can prove it.
Lessig also discusses the decline of “free cultures”. “Free cultures are cultures that leave a great deal open for others to build upon; unfree, or permission, cultures leave much less. Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so.” The point Lessig is making here, is that today it is so easy for creators to steal someone else’s idea, and make it their own. Film makers haven’t had an original idea in years. We keep seeing old movie’s get rehashed and old series get pointless sequels.
But hey, maybe there are some original ideas still right? James Cameron’s 2009 epic “Avatar” was original wasn’t it? Poul Anderson would disagree.
These days it is so hard to determine the original source to content on the Internet. I used to be some what good at Photoshop too and made content,, however I learned the lesson of watermarking them with my name.
ReplyDeleteI know from high school we are told that stealing i wrong, but reality is, most of it is actually unintentional. An example of this is when you may take a photo from Google images, would you really reference the source of that image when you're sharing it with your friends or editing it to make it funny on Photoshop? You wouldn't because again it is unintentional. I use to do the same thing in high school, not that I do it any more. :)
See, I find it interesting that they claimed it as theirs. I often share things and sometimes forget to cite them, but I've never taken something and claimed it as mine. It's funny that some people don't hold to the same morals online as they might hold to offline.
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