Unit Three Wrap up

In unit 3, we focused on many aspects of copyright laws, ethical usage of others content, intellectual property and more. We explored how companies like Disney have previously used content from other sources to influence their own works and then have strict copyright laws to prevent others from doing the same. We also looked at how the ethical copyright was being abused. For example the Maori culture was wrongly portrayed in the Bionicle Lego series. Sunder talked about how corporations are using things from the past in the ways that they want to. This is one of this ethical issues or fair use, which is not willing to accurately depicted others cultures and people. Nothing could really be done because Lego had the ideas and aspects of the series copyrighted. In the movie, RIP Manifesto, we seen how the two largest corporations Warner Chapel and the recording industry association of America controlled and enforced the copyright laws even when it could be deemed inappropriate.  The entirety of the movie was illegal since permissions were not granted for the author to use the songs and clips in his movie. The lawyer in the movie Lawrence Lessig even states that when writing a paper you give the author credit for using their work, the same should be for music and video. How absurd would it be to have to ask permission to use another authors paper to cite in your paper and possibly have to pay them royalties? We discussed the ideas of free and fair culture and as a class the consensus became that our cultures content should be free to the extent that the original creators are fairly receiving credit and/or royalties for their works being samples or remixed. We would like to live in a culture where we are ethically responsible when using aspects of other cultures, works, and more.