Creative Commons or Copyright Criminals?

I am so torn on these issues of copyright debates, sampling from others' work, and freeing the knowledge of the world. While I don’t fully condone what might be considered “stealing” in the form of file sharing, I can’t act like I’m a totally innocent party, that’s all I’ll say about my role. I believe that yes, you have a right to be compensated for your work; I mean you worked all that time on it. However, there are so many things can be created by joining together many people’s ideas. I recently saw this documentary Copyright Criminals on PBS that I felt really made some valid points about this topic, specifically music sampling:

I like how this documentary showed both points of view. Like I said, I feel really conflicted about this; on one hand it seems really lazy to just take other people’s ideas to make something instead of working from scratch on something that is completely your own, but at the same time, many of humanities greatest ideas and creations have only come about by building off others' original ideas.

I think it’s really funny though how people are acting like with the internet has come all of these copyright issues but in reality this has been going on for a long time, the only difference is that the internet just brought it to the whole world instead of few with access. Here is an interesting timeline provided by Copyright Criminals.

I really think that Creative Commons also has legitimate possibilities for spreading knowledge, fostering creativity, and innovating the way we share ideas. To show the possibilities of what can be done with Creative Commons I made a project of my own (Mind you, this is nothing special and I am still learning both CC and Blogger):

I think that if you take something from Creative Commons it should be required that your final product should have to be on Creative Commons too. However, maybe I’m just dumb, I could hardly figure out what I could use, I guess they just want you to figure it out and I had a really hard time with that. I think it says something about the site that someone that’s new to it can’t easily figure out how to productively use it. So, maybe there’s still some work to be done.

http://creativecommons.org/
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