Copywrite

Copy writing  and plagiarizing go hand in hand, sort of. Both are illegal and are claiming a product as your own creative outcomes when they aren't, but it is acceptable to take someone's writings and information to add into a paper of your own as long as you site the source. This is done plenty in school, on scientific studies as a way to double check ones work, or on websites with information on just about any topic, but with sound and film people will see something similar  or hear a few lines from their own song and sue right away. This is crazy to me, especially because it didn't used to be this way. Walt Disney made a little scene starring Mickey Mouse as Steamboat Willie based off of the character Steamboat Bill. People thought it was funny and we still see that little clip of Mickey whistling and driving the boat sometimes today. Today if something like this were to happen, the person creating the copy would usually get sued.

One popular genre of music is song mashups or remixes, but people are getting sued when they try to do their work. Artists are starting to fight back and say that their 1st Amendment and their creativity is being trampled on, buy the companies who own the rights to the songs. This was probably one of the most interesting things to me that was said in the film, especially after an estimate of the prices Girl Talk would have had to pay for his album if he went to each and asked permission to use snippets of their songs in his. His parents were talking about how they thought he was smart and creative, but they worried that one day he would be sued. So many artists do remixes and it makes me wonder if they asked for permission and paid to use the song. I went to a concert a year ago and there were many remixes of songs that I knew or mashups. I thought nothing of it because its creative and the music was great, the guy who was doing it only took credit for the mashups and not the songs within them. I can see both sides of the argument, that the original artists are upset because they feel as though they are being ripped off when another person uses their music to make money, but I can also see how using a 10 second part of a song shouldn't be seen as stealing as long as the person doing to remix only takes credit for the remix. It makes me wonder how far people will go and how long it will take before its almost impossible to create something without it sounding remotely similar to music or film already created. It's concerning that these large corporations are suing up and coming artists for their creativity and then continuing their hunt by suing people who have downloaded a few songs off the internet as well.

When the documentary switched from discussing music and films and brought up patents on living organisms or medical research I thought it had gone too far. This is ridiculous that someone can find a potential cure for a disease, cancer for example, but then be limited to whether or not their research and medicine development can continue because of a patent. Medical industries claim to be about saving people, but this makes it seem more like they are in it for a guaranteed pay check. I think something needs to be done about this and to change the idea of a patent, at least in the medical field. Maybe, rather than being able to patent a living organism or and idea of a way to process ingredients for medicine we could limit the patent to the recipe of the pill itself, but even doing this is still harmful. With a sole person or company having the rights to a pill they can rack up the prices to what they want because there is no competition. We shouldn't be able to patent ideas that can in the end save a person's life.