Kim: Copyright

As I turn on YouTube to listen to a song while writing this blog on copyright, my favorite song I've been listening to yesterday has been taken off due to copyright laws.

Honestly, copyright hasn't really bothered me until recently, when corporations are actively taking control of their materials in places like YouTube. I've never realized copyright laws existed, until this happened (like seeing messages saying it was taken off). I find it kind of ridiculous because the internet is not a place you can really regulate this and this law is kind of sticky. I think that placing a definition of who is violating copyrights laws is really hard. I mean, there are multiple different kinds of users - the industry can say that they are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because people are pirating movies or music off of the internet instead of going to the theaters, but that still doesn't explain the box office numbers rising each year.

Also, I think that it's really affected me in the way to take pictures. My teacher back in high school was really upset whenever we took pictures off of Flickr. He had us ask the person who uploaded it (which I found wierd, because who knows where he/she got the picture in the first place). Like this, with the internet, it's really hard to trace the "real" source for a photo (except for ones that are iconic and famous). For example, there are hundreds of thousands of pictures of a yellow flower. But, you can't 100% say that the picture of a particular yellow flower is a picture taken by the person who uploaded it. What about things that are taken and modified, like fan art? Is the copyright to the original creator, or the creator that modified it? I think that the internet allows for a more rapid change and distribution in that copyright can't keep up. And, honestly, without bold signs saying it was taken off, I rarely notice any copyright laws and I probably break a hundred of them without even noticing it, and I don't think it makes a difference.