Remixing Copyright Drama

When Stephanie Lenz's eighteen month old son started singing and dacing to a Prince song, the family thought it was too cute. After recording him singing the song, she posted it on Youtube, innocently, for friends and family to share and watch, because the video itself was far too many bytes of information to send. Little did she know that the media gods would descend upon her and try to get her for copyright infringement.





At one time, I remember Youtube being completely free from things like this. Laying down tracks of music you like on top of a video of you doing something crazy. Whatever you want. I think after a while, Youtube got too big for its own britches. According to page 1954 of Remix, " By the summer of 2006, Youtube was the world's fastest growing Website. Nielsen ratings insisted that the traffic was growing 75% per week in July 2006. 100 million clips were viewed daily; 65,000 were uploaded hourly. "





Now, Youtube has become something more of a Nazi regime, always controlling and censoring every video you watch it seems. No longer can one embed videos onto websites, blogs, or whatever that are of a certain artist. No mainstream bands will have their music or music videos reposted anywhere. And they make sure of it. At the same time, however, I think that it is also to blame on the "tattletales" of the youtube viewers. While having some control is good over something of an idea like this, but at the same time, there are a few who go overboard and report everything they see. According to P. 195 of Remix, "But some do more than simply consume content. As with Craigslist, the community of Youtube users helps police the content. Inappropriate content gets flagged. Content violating the rules gets reported." I think that some people go a little too overboard, as I will point out in my next example.





A few months ago, my friends and I made a video of a contest of chainsaws. I had a Stihl saw and my friend had a Husqvarna saw. We got equal pieces of wood and tried to see who could cut through the fastest. (dumb, I know, but it was something to do.) Anyway, we posted the video on Youtube, just to see it get taken down because someone reported the video for wrongly using the Stihl and Husqvarna names. After browsing other videos a while, I noticed they did not get taken down, so I did not understand what the problem was. After that little aggrivation, I decided to boycott youtube and stick to other sites that are less patrolled, but show videos.

RO culture Vs. Rw.

RW culture is defined, according to Remix, by Read/Write culture. "All ordinary citizens read and their culture by listening to it or by taking it in through representations of it (musical scores.) This, however, is not enough. Young people of the day add to the culture around them by re-creating the same tools the professionals use. The pianos, guitars, mandolins, and violins, and vocal cords." The fear was that this would disappear, and be taken over by an RO culture, that is, Read Only. "A culture less practiced in performance, and more comfortable with simple consumption."Are we all doomed to be Youtube zombies, where the government controls what we view? Maybe not that overboard, but that would be wild.