So we've had a lecture or two about copyright laws.
There's copyrights, which we all know. They want restrictions on things.
There's copylefts, people who want no restrictions at all.
Then there's the creative commons people, who want private citizens to decide what restrictions should be put on things.
I'm not really sure what side I'm on yet. I've used copyrighted music in the background of YouTube videos before and didn't get in trouble or anything. But then again, that's probably because not many people watch my videos. Wikipedia is a good example of copyleft, because people can pretty much post whatever they want. Lots of people use good ol' Wiki, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's accurate. So if there's never restrictions on anything, that probably wouldn't be good. I'm not sure how Hulu fits into the whole copyrights thing...
I guess the whole big deal about the "pirate's dilemma" is...when you use someone else's music or something, should that be considered stealing or sharing? And how much of something do you have to copy before it's against the law? The whole song? A minute? A split second?
I'm not sure exactly what I think about it yet, but I think as long as we give the original creator of the content credit, it shouldn't be a big deal to use it for your own purposes.
What do you think? And have you ever gotten in trouble for using something that was copyrighted?
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I never really understood this whole ball game... although I think the question of how much is a really good thing to ask. If sharing the whole song is violation, shouldn't it likewise be considered violation to share even a part of it? What if it's such a small part that it's unrecognizable? Clearly, in order to answer these questions of degree, we have to be able to process the matter according to a sense of proportion. We have to know how to balance carefully between okay and too much. And anything that requires a balancing act, a sense of scope, requires dimension. Just think... If you look at a square but in the context of a 2D plane (from the side), all you can see is a line. In order to see that it looks like a square, you have to be able to operate in a third dimension... zoom out, so to speak, or get the big picture. Which is why I'm surprised that the debates about copyright law have tended toward such dichotomistic thinking. Until we decide to handle these issues in an appropriately complex fashion, we will never have a satisfactory answer.
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