Week 1 Eilers Blog Comments

His blog entry:
Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Many thoughts ran through my head as I watched the plethora of videos regarding copyright laws, Fair Use, and Creative Commons. Albeit, most of my thoughts were those of confusion and how my brain was dissecting the confusion. However, after digesting all the information, I feel that I have a better understanding of how copyright works and how organizations like Creative Commons is attempting to bridge the gap in allowing the creative mind the freedom to create and/or re-create. As technology continues to advance and public domain forces copyright laws to change and modify its parameters, Creative Commons, Fair Use, and all the other attempts to assist the freedom of creation will continue to expand. I really felt that the TED video featuring Larry Lessig put all of this into a grand perspective for me. There were many great aspects of his presentation, but I think the thing that struck me was his comments on how the "RW" (read/write) culture turned into a "RO" (read only) culture in the 20th century. Obviously we are seeing a major paradigm shift in this way of thinking because of the rapid change in technology advancement and the speed of the Internet at the turn of the 21st century. At any rate, copyright laws, Fair Use, and Creative Commons have their place, but its what is done to work with/around them to keep challenging culture to create and re-create something new and different for future generations.

My Comments:

Gregg, You hit upon a very telling aspect of this lesson, the RW culture mentioned in Lessig/TED video. Of course, this statement is a further indictment of the Web 2.0 culture we all live in and have been learning further about during our time in this EMDT program. As we learned early on in our program, Web 2.0 is the Read-Write/Re-Mix aspect of the Internet. I too commend the work Creative Commons continues to attempt to resolve within the creative and legal communities. As I mentioned in my blog post, Fair Use is "thrown around" too freely in the education and training environment and I feel this series of videos helped clarify in my mind the appropriate use of this position.