Get some common sense!

The more and more I read of Free Culture the more I get frustrated with the extreme lack of common sense of so many parties involved. The beliefs of the warring sides are becoming so polarized and rigid (rather like some of our politicians right now) that they couldn’t care less about the immense collateral damage (the hindering of culture and creativity). There’s definitely many logical, reasonable solutions to many copyright problems, especially in regards to music downloading. It costs virtually nothing for record companies to post music online, yet on iTUNES and other servers it can cost as much as $1.99 to download. If the music companies would change the price to say, a quarter(ish), many more people would buy music legally instead of turning to illegal alternatives—I know I would be one of them. But instead, I think, companies keep boosting prices of online music when they think their profits are down due to filesharing, which then causes fewer people to buy their product, fileshare, and start the vicious cycle over and over again.

In regards to filesharing itself, I think the used bookstore rule should be applied to downloaded music—once it’s bought, you can do pretty much anything with it as long as it’s not reproduced and SOLD for money. Granted, every time you file share, some claim it’s a “copy,” but in reality it’s not much different than what most people do with their books and more importantly, you’re NOT making money off of it.

Also, I see this entire issue as a direct attack on technology. Years ago, people would loan each other records, or make mix tapes, or copy tapes and CDs and give them to their friends. Now, it is simply a more efficient and larger scale process, but the underlying concept has not changed since its original onset. When factories changed from using mostly people to produce their product to almost complete mechanization, there was certainly outrage at this new technology (oh,no! robots will take over the world—and that myriad people lost their jobs). Eventually, however, our society adapted to this new type of production and is the better and more advanced for it. The same can be said for music downloading. The government needs to stop intervening and allowing the RIAA’s frivolous lawsuits and allow technical evolution to occur.

RIAA should go MIA

I’ll admit it—I’m an ex-filesharer. In middle school I was all about Napster, I rocked Kazaa in high school, and in the dorms OurTunes allowed me to fileshare with everyone in the lakeshore area. I am a person who is a complete stickler for rules—I never even speed or jaywalk, yet I feel absolutely no remorse about any of the alleged “stealing” I’ve done over the years. Why? Simple—the RIAA. With millions upon millions of dollars in revenue, they feel the need to prosecute students and new technologies in an attempt to lose their monopoly on the music industry. Instead of investing in these new technologies and new ways to regulate them legally, they do their best to ban them and monetarily enforce compliance. I see it as a form of civil disobedience to fileshare and thus lack any remorse. Unfortunately, as much as I would love to continue, I’ve had to stop for fear of losing my life savings (my budget doesn’t really have room for a lawsuit) when the RIAA started prosecuting students here at Madison. I refuse, however, to buy any CDs or music on iTunes due to their outrageous cost, and the fact that I would be supporting the awful institution that is the RIAA.

The anecdotes told by Lawrence Lessig in Free Culture only support my previously held beliefs. The fact that the RIAA prosecuted a college student for modifying a search engine that inadvertently allowed students to fileshare and in essence robbed him blind angers me even more than just the few stories I’ve heard about UW-Madison students who were prosecuted. Just like Fast Food Nation has stopped me from eating at McDonalds, I think Free Culture has cemented my “boycott” of CDs and the music business in general. I’m not quite ready to give up on movies yet due to ovguide.com and all of the free movies I can stream—if that ever gets shut down, however, it might be a completely different story…

And the plagiarism award goes to...

The plagiarism assignment surprised me. I had thought that plagiarizing would make writing considerably easier and that it wouldn’t take more than an hour for me to write my essay. I was very, very wrong. I suppose if one plagiarizes poorly, that’s only how long it will take, but plagiarizing “well” I found difficult—especially combining the styles of the three articles from which I plagiarized.

As to my “good” plagiarizing technique, I actually used articles that I found on the library’s website—very scholarly, academic articles that I thought would be easier to find than it turns out they were (my group only found one statistic plagiarized in my paper). I also wrote my own intro, conclusion, and all of my transition sentences. I had to conjugate some verbs differently so the entire article flowed, and often times I moved whole clauses around in sentences so they would be more difficult to find. All of this editing and rearranging, however, took a significant amount of time. It got to the point where I was sick of trying to express myself through other people’s words and would’ve rather just written the paper myself and finished it in a shorter amount of time.

One thing I learned is that it is easier to get away with plagiarism than I thought—especially if you use more obscure sources that are available in print only and not online (that’s what Kait did in our group and she handedly won). As long as you take the time and effort to mix the plagiarized bits around, try to keep your overall style/voice, and cite a few things to throw people off track, I would say that it would be very difficult to catch most people. All those things, however, take a significant amount of time and in the end, I think most people who would be prone to plagiarism or not have any problems with it, would not be willing to expend the effort to blend in the copied bits. As for me, my plagiarism days are over—I would be way more stressed plagiarizing and waiting for people to catch me, than I would ever be if I just did the work myself (regardless of the quality). What about the rest of you? Do you think you could get away with plagiarism in another class? Would you ever consider doing it?