The Creation of Passive Users

A literary response to Boynton's "Tyranny of Copyright."

My main issue with media is the passive interaction users - in particular, my students - have with it. In "Tyranny of Copyright" the movement, Copy Left, is proposing that after a shortened amount of time, certain creative works go back into the public domain to which anyone with access to the internet can be active users and develop "creative reuses" for pieces of artistic work. This generates the questions, "Is any work truly original?" or "Are there anymore original ideas, or has everything already been done and now being recreated?" 

I feel it is essential in my analysis of this article to include my presumed understanding of Copy Left's motives not to allow users to steal ideas as their own, yet use them, add to them, and essentially collaborate with the originators to develop something even better that at a later date will be used again, and again redeveloped. 

I have to agree with Yale’s law professor, Yochai Benkler, when he said, ''People are users. They are producers, storytellers, consumers, interactors -- complex, varied beings, not just people who go to the store, buy a packaged good off the shelf and consume.''

As an educator, I realize that my 6^th grade students learn a tremendous amount solely from modeling and then allowing them to imitate. We are all already imitations of our individually valued social norms, media and environments. Why not allow them to interact with movies, literature and even music on a level that will help them to become much more than consumers? Instead of having their culture done to them, why not give them the power to decide in what ways and when media should be enhanced and redirected in new, innovative areas? Imagine if we couldn’t use Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to recreate more modern versions. Why is this privilege only given to a select few?

Creators of work should not be the sole beneficiaries of the idea. At some point, everyone has to be creative philanthropists and allow their ideas to be reshaped and improved upon by someone else. This is the only way to live forever. Without someone to innovate on your ideas, your brilliance may very well die with you.

A literary response to Manovich’s, “Vertov’s Dataset” prologue.

The prologue of “Vertov’s Dataset” takes the reader through a series of key points the book is trying to make essentially in defense of the evolution of cinema and the uses of cameras to make advancements on what the naked eye can see.

The prologue speaks to progression and innovation as a necessary and inevitable part of life. Just as cameras were created to capture the images that were previously reserved for paintings, a video camera was created to capture and enhance the motions of life.

But does this mean that a painting is less valuable than a picture or that films that used less effects than today’s cinematic blockbusters are more or less valuable? Does an advancement have to affect the idea it grew from’s significance?

In a lot of ways the next big thing will always overshadow, for a time, whatever came before it, but there should be study and use of the previous media forms as well. We mustn’t move forward into a world where the past becomes irrelevant. It is our past and previous creations that catapult us into our future.