Litman and Copyright

Copyright as a phrase by itself is a loaded word that comes with responsibilities and consequences in filing a copyright for ownership of a good or service. Litman has an interesting section about how infringement is made daily by the population of the world, in form of minor changes and alterations to parodies and complete remakes. “An art student completing a class assignment goes to an art museum and meticulously copies a Picasso painting. A high school band rcords its garage-practice rendition of a top 40 hit. These things happen everyday, and are all prima facie infringing.” (Litman 8). It’s interesting to see how something as docile and innocent as a man changing a song and re-writing the words for his wife on their wedding day, can be charged and fined because of copyright infringement simply because he did not attain permission to do this. The world has gone mad with lawsuits and wars over property that people continuously claim are theirs and have no right to be tampered with. To an extent that is true, no one in their right mind would want a song they created “ruined” or a movie they made which has great meaning behind it “redone”. These copyrights do serve a purpose because they protect the very rights that creators have for their finished masterpieces, but at the same time trhey battle the fight against individuals who want to compete in that same market, or feel they can make “it” better in their own vision.
In a sense, some could say that the copyright industry is a monopoly, they are the ones that write the rules on whether or not a product passes (The Washington Copyright Office). Also, the Office turns inventors ideas away if they are too similar causing changes in original planning as well as ideas being dumped and restarted from scratch. It’s hard to say who is right and who is wrong in the copyright industry, that is a reason that Litman enjoys teaching this topic. There seems to be a double standard when it comes to the world of copyrights, such as the, “It’s ok if I do it, but not you.” Type of mentality. I mean, this is the reason we have copyrights correct? So that others cannot come up wit a similar idea and take it as their own work for them to make oodles and oodles of profit and recognition from it.

Copyright

The speaker in this crazy rant brought up some valid points about how individuals in the past could pick and choose different media and content and then put it all together to be called their own. His story about how Walt Disney stole ideas from Steamboat Bill since copyright wasn't existent and claimed it as his own just shows how people get away with and are comfortable stealing from other peoples' work. In Asia it's the same, gaming companies, anime companies as well as other technological aspects do not use copyrights over there, the culture is based off the honor system. A person can upload any of their ideas onto the internet and not be fined since there aren't laws that protect the companies content. That's a social norm over in asia though, in America this is seen as opportunity to get ahead with a great idea.

The copyright wars though have gone beyond what they are intended for, companies make thousands if not millions for giving permissions to others so they may use their content. For the guy that wanted to use the Simpson's picture, $25k would have to be thrown down for the permission to use it. That's highly absurd, since now copyrights are being viewed as a window of making money instead of their original goal which was just to protect concent from being stolen and acredited to others. The speaker does bring up a good point though about how there are grey areas in the technological aspect of our world today, stating that as long as it's tweaked and not the same then someone can copyright that image and not get in trouble with the law aspect behind the technological changes.