THING NO. 23- Thoughts on Creative Commons and Copyrights

Thanks to creative commons the above link was where our 23 Things Journey was spun from. It was sited at the bottom of our blog by Dr. Wall. I truly enjoyed the experience. Concerning Creative Commons, I appreciate the effort that is trying to be made here. I believe in the impact that education can make on this issue. I realize that reality clearly is far from a society who respects the creator of any piece of work. I hope that in my classroom, I can do my small part by at least making students aware and educated on what is acceptable...and clearly what is not. I spoke in an earlier blog about the media summit I attended last week. My eyes were opened to how major market industry visionaries see the creator of music as a sole giver to the business. Meaning, they said basically "give your music away for free" because people are going to get it if they want it anyway. This side of the playing field encouraged more branding and merchandise sales than they did stressing with copyrights and protecting original works. Yes, I know what side of the industry these expert panels worked for, which are the artists. I really have no idea what some of these people would sing without the songwriter who makes their dream a profession. Comments like that may only make sense to people like me who fight to protect songwriters but, it simply makes zero sense to not hold value to the people who truly create. Today, most major artist are not writers. If you see their name as a songwriter on a song you can assume that a majority of the time the artist agreed to cut the song only if they would give him or her songwriting credit. Yes, this is how it works and if I am ever placed in that situation I do not know how I will handle it...hopefully calmly. Yet, when we get into copyrights and creative commons often sharing is caring for a while. In fact, hearing our music is a bonus in all directions. It is when other writers and artist steal ideas and music and re-write original works that a major line has been cross. I have ran into this issue once. I can not say the artist because I was not the publisher on the particular song that Kenneth Duncan wrote. Yet, the song ended up on a major artist's album the following year after a song was written and then knock-off written by consulting writers...basically they put their networking skills to the test and banked on it.