Copyright and ownership.
These are the subjects covered by RiP! A Remix Manifesto which we watched in class today. The writer/director hopes to combat copyright enforcers as he looks to promote upholding and expanding the public domain.
This is a common question in the digital age, what material can we use? There is endless access to almost all information on the internet, example sites are Reddit and Wikileaks. We can access anything but yet organizations and businesses seek out punishment for the people that look to educate and learn via the internet and other platforms.
If we look at the academic aspect of this idea of free information and sharing others’ ideas and building off those ideas; we start to see issues with this copyright approach. As we are encouraging inquiry-based learning, we must ask are we limiting the creativity of our youth when we put restraints on their ability to use materials that are deemed as others? How can we punish others for creating material they may believe they created all on their own, or that they have made into their own through changes?
I think that plagiarism is an issue and does require enforcement, but students should not be punished to the extreme. If it is the word for word copy, I think students require some form of punishment and always site material. But, we are constantly bombarded with information we cannot cut out of our lives such as ads. RiP! A Remix Manifesto makes this argument that if it is forced down our throat why not be able to use a part of sed material. We might use something because we have experienced it but do not know consciously that we are ripping that idea off another person.
If we allow students to manipulate materials we will only be protecting our youth from prosecution, but keeping legal restraints on this won’t prevent the use of these materials. This will empower youth to further ideas that might lead to solving collective problems.
Each generation must knock down barriers that have been placed by their predecessors, why not help them rather than fight a battle that only makes the rich get richer and suppress the growing minds that make up society.
-Ari Stevens