The very thought of Copyright and ownership is scary to me, as I assume the great majority of infringement happens innocently, or at least somewhat accidentally. I know if I ever participated in it, it would be entirely inadvertent. That said, I feel comfortable calling into question the very idea of originality, and therefore ownership. Someone may take a picture, but did they create everything in the picture? Likely not always.
Looking at the record I chose to emphasize in the featured image, Elvis (I love and respect Elvis, just a potent example), a man who essentially stole what Black culture was doing with music, and like many other white musicians, took it and popularized it. Surely, People of Colour, who can be considered the “closest to the original” iteration of Rock, were not credited nor rewarded for what was in many ways an expression of their hearts and souls. This is a long winded way of saying, do they own it? Should they have? And in a world that would never let this fly today… does this not demonstrate the strange and unfair structural injustice that underlays creation in our society?
Another thing comes to mind, in the documentary about Girl Talk (Remix Manifesto) a lady who has worked in the Copyright Office for decades mentions that a large consideration for whether something is allowed or not is how much the person who “created” it cares. This seems too open ended for me, and I can’t help but get stuck on the fact that we live in a world where hardly anything seems original. That said, I would hate for someone to spend their life working on something, just to have it stolen by someone else who claims to be the initial creator. It makes sense to have some degree of protection. I suppose this implies somewhat of an agreement with and respect for Copyright Commons and how it is there to support creators, and sharers alike. I like the ability for gradation in permissions and requirements for attributions.
My initial reaction to all this Copyright photo crediting stuff was to avoid the whole thing by using only my own photos. Now I realize perhaps I need to somehow talk about those too…(Do I need to write anything beneath or about my own photos that I use?)… but I ought not avoid the whole point of this course and the skills I am meant to develop. (Big step for me: I figured out how to get a photograph off of Unsplash, and attribute it properly!)
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash
