Lessig part 1 Blog

Lessig starts off with piracy. He talks about file sharing over the internet of copyrighted and uncopyrighted information. The first thing I thought about was google. I know that I use images from Google for my Facebook cover photo, class assignments, and just for fun. I’m sure most of the photos are copyrighted, but how am I supposed to know? Google has all of these images available for everyone to look at and to maybe even use. Some images are uploaded by personal users others are uploaded by professional users; professional in the sense that they are a company or organization. The first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word piracy is the video that used to be at the beginning of most DVDs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU

On page 32 Lessig says, “Creative work has value; whenever
I use, or take, or build upon the creative work of others, I am taking from them something of value. Whenever I take something of value from someone else, I should have their permission. The taking of something of value from someone else without permission is wrong. It is a form of piracy.”

This reminds me of a class discussion we have about creative commons. Every idea we have is inspired by someone else. It’s inspired by something we’ve seen or heard that has been created by someone else ranging from a video, an image, a building, a website, etc. No one has original ideas. All of our ideas are influenced and according to the above definition of piracy we must ask permission from everyone whose work has inspired us, but that’s not the way it works. We look at websites, images, and videos to get an idea of what we would like to create for most of our DTC classes. We often even take images we have found and add a filter or edit the image in Photoshop so that it is no longer technically copyrighted because we altered the image. So, are we committing piracy?