The article “The Copyright Balance and the Weight of DRM” argues that it is hard to receive payment from every consumer of a cultural work. The article illustrates a situation where a group of college students watch a movie together, yet the film was purchased by only one person. In this case, the friends of the person who bought the movie can be thought of as consumers of the movie, but they did not pay for it. Likewise, YouTube has myriad clips of movies and even full movies or TV shows that are available to anyone with an internet access. There is currently no means of extracting payment from all the people who watch the videos.
The article also mentions that copyright protects an author’s particular expression and not the content of one’s work. The author of the article says that he cannot stop other people from writing about the same topic that he is writing on: copyright laws. Similarly, when someone posts a video on YouTube that describes, for example, little ways each of us can improve the environment, that person cannot stop others from making similar videos or video responses.
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Good job connecting the examples from the article to YouTube. Like you said, there is no way that the creators of the videos on YouTube can be paid by every watchers, including myself. Also, I am sure many people use ideas from YouTube videos to create similar videos themselves. So, YouTube is a good exmaple that reinforces the idea of copyright laws becoming complex and vauge with the advanced technology.
ReplyDeleteVery well supported! I agree with the perspective that everyone who watches the movie is a consumer of the movie. However, like you said there is currently no method for getting everyone who watches the movie to pay to see it. I also believe that there will never be stricter policies on this simply because the vast majority of the people would never vote to pass a policy where they would be forced to pay that much more.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you say in the second paragraph; however, I personally don't think that writing about the same topic as someone else is considered copyright infringement. There is a difference between sharing similar ideas and actually plagiarizing another person's work, but this is what citations are for. However, as there is no such thing as citations and borrowing content in songs and movies, copyright laws are more strict for these subjects. This could also be due to the larger amounts of money that is made for songs and movies than for books and scholarly article/essays.
ReplyDeleteIn your first paragraph you made a valid point, but I think it extremely different to have a group of say, ten students watching a movie together that only one of them bought, while a few thousand consumers may be able to access a video one person paid for and posted on Youtube. In the first case, the person who produces the video loses out on very little potential profit in comparison to what a posting on Youtube would cost him. Also, I agree with your point in the second paragraph, but I still feel that a lot of times Youtube displays direct copies of someone's work, or their particular expression. For instance, it is very common to find an exact copy of a music video on Youtube.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I also think it is a bit extremely different to have a group of say, only one of them bought while few thousands consumers may be able to access a video one preson paid for and posted on youtube. In youtube, displays do direct copies of someone's work.
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