Wk1: Blog Comment #2: Helen Xiong

Watching these videos fall one into another and how people around the world are so creative is amazing. Isn't that what we want our children and learners to grow into? Working, intelligent, and creative leaders of our future? But to also think about how if they are to try these things to be caught by this copyright law is frightening. Everyone needs to be more aware of the use of fair use and everyone, including myself, needs to be understand the use of copyrighted material.

You are right that in this day and age people have to be more careful, but is it right...should we have to be "AFRAID" to be creative. Something about that just seems terribly wrong. I think copyright laws have gotten out of hand and there should be a huge overhaul done to the laws. This should especially be done now that we have the internet and people have so much more access to copyrighted things that inspire their own creativity. There is a difference between people downloading music illegally just to listen to it, it is another thing to take someone's creative idea and build onto it, changing it, improving it.

Reading about how numbers were produced by researchers about how many billions of dollars and thousands of jobs were lost in the U.S. due to people illegally downloading and etc...I must agree with the article posted that it can't all be true...maybe not the U.S. but other countries have been doing this for centuries before it hit big in the U.S. I talked to my parents tonight about this and they can remember their childhoods filled with these streets of illegal vendors sellings of cd's and dvd's.

This present another delemma, copyright laws are only affecting those in the US, when the bigger problem is overseas. Why punish ourselves and squash our creativity while the rest of the world can get away with it?