Hello Interweb!

So last week during my first tutorial class for Network, all the students received a checklist for customising our blogs and such. Being the AWESOME student that I was, I may or may not have completely forgotten about the list… which is why I turned up to my second class confused on how many blogposts we needed and not really having anything Network Media related at all… FAIL WHALE. Hence the catvideo, forgive me my tutor for my inefficiency. Anyways… IN DIS CLASS WE DISCUSSED….

Copyright laws and Internet Memes
Consider this: you take a photo, post it in a public area online, an individual sees the photo, takes it and turns it into a meme. The meme blows up and the dipshit who stole the image in the first place is lost in the sea of people that is reddit/9gag/some other website. Due to this fact you can neither prove that this image was stolen from you nor who was the one who stole it so you can gain compensation. Balls.

That’s the thing about copyright though, even if credit is given by the distributer, it doesn’t matter as long as the original artist does not agree with releasing their material, they can still sue the pants off ya. Luckily, if you’re smart then you’ll know that the internet consists approximately of 100329059358290582930582903 people of which you can disappear into.

Despite the previous point, some fair use of material include: satire or parodies, or (as seen in the readings) some artists can provide us with certain rules so that we are allowed to share their content on the basis that we follow these rules. E.g. crediting them for their work, informing them before we change it…etc. (Also know as Creative Commons)

We also made a flow chart/diagram/mind map (Kinda reminds me of highschool…) on…

What is the internet?
Internet VS www (world wide web) – Domain – home – webpage
Internet = Roads (On anything else that doesn’t need a browser)
www = Buildings (In a browser)
Webpage – book page? – content – purpose? – interaction – intention – content draws audience but does not limit them
Google – judge by number of links people put to – quality vs quantity

(Yeah sorry, that was the best way I could type out the diagram, I’ll make sure to get an actual photo next time.)

Some other sort discussions we had were about:

– How to get popular/views/seen on the internet via our blogs, before we all came to the unanimous conclusion that a unique online identity seems to be the best way to get recognise.

– Cookies – the crumbs of your web browser that connects to you to webpages that you have visited

– Kickstarter – the Potato Salad project, this kid literally has about $52,000… just to make potato salad, if I had known that was all it took to make cash then I would have made as much potato salad as the internet wanted. Fuck a day job, I’m going to make some potato salad.

This was an early screenshot I found, but now it’s literally raised up to $52,000!!!

Talk to you all soon my lovelies!

Creative Commons

What is it? That was the first thing I thought about when I watched the introductory video I was given, no actually I’m lying, the first damn I thought about was how someone could draw such a fucking perfect image of the earth.

Moving on…

Basically, a Creative Commons license is a free licensing tool that allows artists to share and the public access to use their material with given boundaries/restrictions.

There are many different types of Creative Commons License’s available for artists to choose from depending on how much freedom they wish to give away.

E.g. Allowing your work to be used by others as long as you are credited, however they are not allowed to change the material in any form or manner, nor are they allowed to gain profit from selling/distributing your material.

CopyRight

The overall theme of this week’s readings was “how do I avoid a copyright dispute on my blog and end up paying my life’s supply of money?” Establishing what we are and are not allowed to share on this page. As well as the protection we receive for our content, such as if we post a photo or video are is completely our own.

To me is seems as if everything these days has some form of copyright within it’s name; images, videos, song lyrics and even certain words when used in the wrong context. We can’t insult, we can’t copy, we can’t even sing a song without technically breaking the law.

I guess what everyone is just trying to tell us is that our own digital footprint can be your best friend or worst enemy, don’t insult and don’t touch what isn’t yours. Whilst some care little for what happens to their content as long as they’re name is the one that appears under the title: Artist, there are many out there who will go the distance to make you life shit. Why? You may ask, because they’re private about their content, and if it’s popular enough they will want to protect it just the same way you’ll want to protect one of your assets.

Be safe online my children!

For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.
 – Margaret Heffernan