History 390 blog

The main topic for this week was copyrighting, and sampling. The subject matter was interesting because though I did know a decent amount about copyrighting, and sampling from either other classes I’ve been in, or from my knowledge of the music industry, I did learn more in depth information about both that I didn’t know about before. I want to start out with the example given in class about John Locke. I heard about Locke before, but I didn’t realize how much of a jerk he was. To think that the land belong to them who were foreigners to this country was beyond explanation. He tried to say that since they laid roots down, and were attending to the land that the land belonged to them instead of the Native Americans. He felt as though they were not people who worked the land, and cared for it properly which was false. Again that was just a way for him to rationalize them taking over a piece of land that wasn’t theirs. Trying use squatter rights as an excuse. It’s ridiculous. That was a great lead into the conversation about Copyright though because events like this showed the need for those laws, but at the same time if Native Americans even had laws like this the new settlers wouldn’t respect them anyways. That’s just the reality of things. To move forward from that, I think the copyright rules how they are prove to be fair. Reason I say that is because there is only so much that is new under the sun, so ideas will be recycled, and made into better pieces of work. While the copyright is in effect, it’s only right to pay homage to the person who created the idea, but once the 120 year period is up then people should be able to do what they want with the intellectual property. What I found the most interesting was the conversation about the public domain. I didn’t realize Disney got a lot of their movie and story ideas from there. I believe I did hear that some of the stories came from older stories, but to see how they are able to get them was interesting because honestly they are doing what you should be able to do to an intellectual property once the copyright has ran out in improving the idea, When you see the origin of some of the stories, a good amount of them were kind of morbid, so it was a good thing they were improved upon.

With sampling, since I do like music a lot, and am a communications major with a concentration in media & criticism, I have heard a lot of what we discussed in class. Like the funky drummer for example, I’ve seen a few hip hop documentaries where I saw him explaining how he doesn’t mind totally that people use his beats, but he wants credit because that is his piece of work. That makes sense, and artist/ producers who use it should give a small portion of money to them as compensation for using his work. That being said, I don’t believe anybody’s work should be seen as off limits because as a artist you should be free to create. I get both sides of the argument honestly. I just try to put my foot in the shoes of someone like the funky drummer, and try to think how I would feel about people using my work in their works without giving me credit, that would suck especially since the drumline has been used a lot. I didn’t realize even the powerpuff girls used his work in their opening theme song, that was crazy to find out. Then again as an artist, as I said earlier, you don’t want to be constrained when you create, you just want to create, and have fun in the process. It’s one of those things where it’s a tough conversation because both sides have a valid argument, but the rules being how they are, you have to give credit in some way to the originator of the work, and honestly it’s only right to do so.