People don't like to be copied, we seem to have an imagined grandeur in our head that everything we create is entirely original and because of that, we are unique. Yet, our uniqueness truly isn't all that original, we tend to...borrow. For instance, my previous blog entries are examples of my self-proclaimed originality, but their very existence prevents them from being unique. There are an endless supply of bloggers on the internet who display the same type of sass, and inevitably someone also used Webster's format to define themselves. This isn't to sound pessimistic, as we are all entirely different combinations of a lot of different experiences but also a lot of shared sources. Though for the most part unintentional, we can't help but copycat. Enter legal system.
Copyright was first created to enforce individual rights, the idea being that larger quantities of ideas would disseminate because persons felt secure knowing that their intellectual property would be just that, theirs. Cultural development ensued and the world was better for it...in 1790. Nowadays, it has become supremely difficult to create much of anything as there is a vast amount of copyright red tape inhibiting growth and change, a lot of which covers really common ideas. Musicians often are confronted by this, as there are only so many chord progressions within the musical realm, and so many protected by law from use without payment first. Though the Fair Use Provision act has allowed many to overcome this difficulty, many still struggle in achieving self expression, persecuted by a lower case letter C. I think that through the creation of new regulations such as Creative Commons, we can once again become a developmental society, not worrying about impinging or infringing but just creating.
Two Wrongs Don't Make a Copyright by Moira Allen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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