Monday, April 8, 2013

Reading Responses to CyberReader Essays

Please write a response to one of the two essays you read for this week in our CyberReader.

What struck you as important?  Why?

How can we apply these ideas to our world today?  Where should we look for more information on this subject?

Use one direct quote from one of the essays somewhere in your response.

Please post your reading response in the Comments section of this post so we have all the class reactions in one place.  Pay attention to what other people are saying?!

All best,

Mike


14 comments:

  1. In the essay "Where Music Will Be Coming From", I found the line "With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again" the most important. I found this important because now we can do a lot more with music than just listen to it. We can remix the songs and do as we wish to alter the music now, so it has become a verb. Before you had to be a major musician to be able to make music. We can apply this to our world today because a lot more people have the opportunity to play around with music now. Almost anyone can get some type of software to record songs or remix songs. You can find a lot more information about this on the internet, where you can download software.

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  2. I read the essay called The Tyranny of Copyright. A quote that struck me as important was on page 208; it reads, "Since the mere threat of a lawsuit is usually enough to scare most providers into submission, the law gives private parties veto power over much of the information published online." This is another example of us being stripped of our freedoms. The internet is supposed to be a place where anybody can post their opinion and voice what they think is right. If we have no freedom to say what we want on the internet, then it loses the whole meaning on which it was founded.

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  3. The essay The Tyranny of copyright? Most important aspect was how copyright laws are more a malice than any way it supposedly helps. Robert Boynton said it best, “While the American copyright system was designed to encourage innovation, it is now, they contend, being used to squelch it”. This is important because simply things such as downloading music through say a torrent would incur a hefty penalty now-a-days leading some people to losing nearly everything. The best place to look for more information would be the copyright law websites or organizations with such information.

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  4. After reading the essay,"Where Music Will Be Coming From", it made me think hard about how I have listened to music throughout my life. It is important to realize that it is so easy to get a hold of music nowadays. I can find any song for free just by searching on Youtube. Here I can also find any remix of said song. Kelly states that,"once a music is digitized it becomes a liquid that can be morphed and migrated and flexed and linked" (221), and I cannot agree more. I know plenty of people who can quickly make a remix of a song and link to me within a day of the original's release due to the liqidity of digital media. Encouraging copies and remixes is a very good form of marketing. For example some of the artists that I listen to on a regular basis are those I found from hearing a remix originally. Thus I think that we should encourage digital sharing.

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  5. "Where Music Will Be Coming From" This article was an interesting take on the future of the music industry. I have wondered before how the music industry stays afloat with so many ways to get free music floating around. However, it shouldn't surprise me, because I still go to iTunes for all my music, even though I know I can get it free somewhere else. Kelly made a good point when he pointed this out. Though we can get music free, most people value the "real" music enough to go ahead and pay for it. I also like Kelly's view of the future of music because he is explaining that we do not neccessarily need to crack down on copywrite-infringing trade of music in order to keep the music industry afloat. Music will grow and change but there will always be people, and most likely a lot of them, who are willing to spend the money to get the real thing.

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  6. I read the first essay, "The Tyranny of Copyright" and one of the things that stood out to me was one of the copyright horror stories. "Recent cases have involved everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires..." really struck me as a crazy concept. To think that even those songs can face copyright infringement really baffles me.

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  7. In Kevin Kelly's essay, "Where Music Will be Coming From", a passage towards the end of the article really stuck out to me. On page 223 in the last full paragraph, Kelly stated, "It will still be a rare person who can write and play music that everyone swoons over. Those hit musicians will have their own economics. But most music, like most photography, needn't appeal to everyone. . . . Music does not have to be widely popular to be desired." I choose this passage because it is true. Anyone can copy someones music, if it be their style or maybe some lyrics. The true artist is an innovator, someone that thinks outside of the box and comes up with something fresh and untouched. People are always looking for the next big thing, it seems that the more unique and different, the better. This world needs those type of people though, they are the type of people that gets things done, that don't rely on piggybacking others. The internet today can definitely emphasize this point and shed more light on the situation.

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  8. After reading the essay "Tyranny of Copyright," the quote that struck me is "you'll get to the point where you say, 'Well, I guess that 25 cents isn't too much to pay for this sentence." This really struck me because I connected it to my personal life. I would have had to pay to include that quote and also, I probably wouldn't be too thrilled with writing the research paper. This quote also shows how ridiculous it has gotten for us to be able to actually see this happening sometime.

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  9. The essay i read was "Where Music Will Be Coming From" by Kevin Kelly. The biggest thing that i took away from this, was how unoriginal the music industry is becoming and free music isn't always the best. I had high expectation for this article because I love finding new music on line, but the author really only stated the obvious. He does make a good point that people are not as musically creative as they used to be. He asks a very good question when he wonders, "How can an unskilled population create something that will be appreciated by many? The partial answer i that most of us won"t. (223) Most music today found on the internet is copies of someone else's work or it is so crappy that it is like bad rap that has to use foul language and graphic ideas just to be popular. (Nicki Minaj or Pitt Bull) Good artists, who can actually sing without a computer and write their own music, have the ability to engage many audiences.. not just be a 'flash in the pan'.

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  10. Kevin Kelly's three stages of copydom , in his essay "Where Music Will be Coming From", predict the future of the music industry. The first was perfection of analog and digital copies. The second, which we are in right now is freeness. When Kelly says, "The ability to make copies in mind-boggling quantities, ceaselessly and perfectly, was the chief ingredient of mass culture"(219), he wasn't just talking about music but it is so true. His third level of "digital copy-ness" is the power of liquidity. Music isn't only free today, but we can do so many things with it, and this is one of the important factors, Kelly thinks that will play a major role in the future of the music industry.

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  11. In the essay, "Tyranny of Copyright", I believe a very good point is made about the government from a supreme court hearing about copyright laws. In Eldred vs. Ashcroft, Lessig argues that the constitution is violated because the copyrights were only suppose to be applied for a "limited time" and the laws now are are for a super long time, some including having rights up to 70 years after the publisher is dead. The government basically says they had power to change that rule, so they did. So, as Robert S. Boynton says in the essay, "there is nothing to stop a future congress from extending copyrights term again and again."
    I think this shows just how much the government can get away with,even if the constitution says otherwise. If they can change this constitution's requirement, what else can they change?
    I think the copyright laws are good on the one hand, so that people are encouraged to publish there works without fear that someone else will claim it as theirs, and make a profit from it. I also believe that there should be a shorter time put on the copyright though, so that others can be creative and culture can grow. That was another good point made in the article. Copyleft idealists believe that "the Interent has been a catalyst for re-engageing wit h culture-for interaction...as opposed to just sitting back and absorbing them" and this is how ideas and new inventions happen and should be encouraged upon. This is another reason why I do not believe the government should not have had the power they did,to change the copyright laws to how long they are today.

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  12. The first essay, "Tyranny of Copyright", talks about the use of copyright,(on) and off the internet, along with the artists and how music is illegally downloaded. In the very first page it talks about the voting machines and how information of their product could be fraudulent was found, then exposed, caused only harm to the exposers. Due to the strict law (D.M.C.A) they had to take down the information about the machines, and where threatened with law suits. I believe the laws should be flexible on what can be exposed without penalty.

    The second essay, "Where Music will be Coming From", seems to be about the music of 1900s- and the music of now, and how copies affect the life of music. Kevin Kelly states on page 223 that, "creating music is hard", and in a way hes right. If you look at the music nowadays compared to almost any older music, you'll notice the makeup of songs. The present songs are just filled with unoriginal chorus and some new lines. An example being Rihannas, " Shine Bright Like a Diamond", where the same chorus is repeated dozens of times. Older Music was thought out and planned to be an original piece of music like orchestras, operas and many other types of music.

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  13. The article "Where Music will be coming from" is something everyone can relate to. Everyone has their favorite song and wonders what will come of the music industry. Think about how much music changes from decade to decade. Although the article claims it is predictable, I disagree. This is because nobody from the fifties would think music would be where it is today and people would be rappers and hip hip dancers and what not. I do agree with the fact that music is not of the quality of say of Willie Nelson or even The Beatles. Music in my opinion lacks that soul it used to have. Today people are not necessarily musicians, they tone their voices using computers and technology, therefore anyone can be a musician. It is hard to say what music will be in the future, but we will always have the oldies.

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  14. There is so much to take from Kevin Kelly's "Where Music Will Be Coming From." I think one of the most important topics he addresses is the evolution of music and its accessibility. He mentions how specific inventions had set the foundation of the new fad or development of music (for example, the invention of the piano to the shift in music with the invention of electricity). He also mentions how music has become so accessible, in a negative way. He writes, "Copies are so ubiquitous, so cheap (free, in fact) that the only things truly valuable are those which cannot be copied. What kinds of things can't be copied? Well, for instance: trust, immediacy, personalization. There is no way to download these qualities from existing copies or to install them from a friend's CD" (page 220). Kelly's main point is to firmly address that you can't get the same quality from copied music. It isn't the same, it isn't as good, and it lacks important characteristics. This information gets you thinking because so many people today get their music by coping on the internet. They do not receive real, authentic music that can be "customized for the audio parameters of (their) room or car" (page 221). It is more important to get the better quality than to get it free. That is what people today should always consider when getting new music.

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