Erin McClamroch
English 457-Seminar
Zach Whalen
April 30th, 2010
Copyright and the Internet: Has it Affected Creativity?
Copyright has earned its place in academia and its relevance in all areas of study is undeniable. With the proliferation of the internet, Copyright has been faced with new and diverse problems. Copyrights' effects on creativity are visible on a daily basis through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; and the list is endless and full of works that are copied and reproduced ad nauseum. Their origin may have been creative, but has since lost all traces of creativity. Our society is succumbing to the ease of duplication with little regard to Copyright and its seemingly antiquated set of rules. Licensing and Copyrights were created to protect ideas and works that were sent out and to give boundaries for their uses, but the question of whether they are beneficial or harmful to creativity has recently been raised. In this time, it is important to look to the past in order to understand the present and future of Copyright to see if it will have the ability to maintain its role in the scholarly world or if it is beginning to stifle creativity in this digital age.
The Past
Creativity:
Creativity is a term that has been debated for centuries and has a meaning that has evolved with the times in which it inhabits. Creativity comes from the Latin word “creatio” referring to matters dealing with God's creations and had no significance in the realm of human creations (Century). The first person to use the term as we know it today was a Polish poet, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, in the 17th century (Century). Dictionary.com defines creativity as: “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.” Since the first use of the word many issues have surrounded the term, “creativity”, and what constitutes a truly creative work. Whole societies, like the American Creativity Association (ACA), have been created in honor of what they view as creative. The ACA views creativity as a discipline and defines the field in broad terms including psychological and social processes as well as implementation processes (innovation) and impacts (ACA Core Values & Principles). Discussions involving the creativity of certain artistic endeavors are being help on a constant basis, but creativity can also involve things from scientific, mathematic, or many other different mediums. Now a days artists and other types of creators aretaking the argument of creativity to a new undeveloped levels. Marcel Duchamp is straddling the line between copying and creativity with his artwork; for example, he has taken the well known painting of the Mona Lisa and added a mustache and goatee and claimed that this is a creative work. Not only has he made this claim, but some critics agree that the thought behind the work and the new place that it takes the original work makes this is a creative piece. Children learn to foster creativity and to search it in every aspect of their lives to embrace it and value it as something important to our futures. For the purposes of this paper creativity will be defined as the quality of creating a work with some thought to its artistic or aesthetic value as something that is different from previous works.
Copyrights:
Copyright is “a form of protection grounded in the U.S. Constitution and granted by law for original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Copyright covers both published and unpublished works” ("Frequently Asked Questions."). Copyright was created in the United States in 1787 when James Madison suggested to the framers of the Constitution a provision to “to secure to literary authors their copyrights for a limited time.” ("Frequently Asked Questions.") Shortly thereafter, according to the United States government-run Copyright website, Congress enacted the first federal copyright law in May 1790, and the first work was registered within two weeks. Currently, copyrights are available to be registered for online, and is probably one of the most widely used forms of licensing. Copyright is a tried a true system that has survived many new societies and has continually evolved to fit the new requirements. Unfortunately, Copyright is such an old institution that it is laden with fictions that many hold as facts because of its thick layer of legal jargon that surrounds even a basic understanding. This lack of knowledge and lack of accessibility stems from a public, and possibly in the United States a societal, decision to not gain more information on protecting or sharing information, but to rely on the government to take care of those things for them. In regards to understanding Boyle, the author of The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind makes a strong point that “contrary to what everyone has told you, the subject of intellectual property is both accessible and interesting; what people can understand, they can change—or pressure their legislators to change.” (Boyle)What many people do understand is that Copyright laws cover both written and non-written works of intellectual property. This basic knowledge leads people to carelessly slap Copyrights on their works without realizing the red tape that it places around their creation- blocking it off, for all intents and purposes, to others who may be able to use it for other creative ventures. Generally speaking, copyrights are the fallback license that is applied to most content or ideas whether explicitly expressed or not; it is the umbrella that covers all intellectual property. However, with the ease and increase of placing works under Copyright and the desire for these works to be more accessible, there has also been an influx of the exploitation of the loopholes present in this system.
The Internet:
The idea of the world wide web became a reality in 1969 with the ARPANET connecting four computers at different locations on the same network (History of the Internet). Several decades, and with the work of people such as Tim Berners Lee who is credited with being the father of the internet, we were introduced to the internet and world wide web that we now know. The internet provides more information than one human being could ever hope to transverse in his or her lifetime. Information has begun to be transmitted in mere milliseconds across thousands, even tens of thousands of miles. This sharing of information has added greatly added to the problem of ownership due to the fact that everybody has the ability to get their hands on almost all information no matter how it is protected. Positively, this broadens people's horizons and gives them access to information that would have been more difficult to attain in times before the internet. Negatively, users face the possibility of an information overload where it may become difficult to trust sources and information that is found online. As easy as the creators of the internet have made it to navigate, they have made it that much harder to define. One's understandings of the internet are shrouded in simplistic metaphors that really take away from the true experience of the code behind what one is seeing. This generation's ability to understand complex issues and licenses is beginning to fade with their attention span and services on the internet have had to step in to account for these changes.
Creative Commons:
In the evolution of the laws and foundations of Copyright that is based in the internet and the issues that have arisen from it, Creative Commons has arrived on the scene to alleviate some the stress that Copyright has been feeling in this digital age. Creative Comsmons “work(s) to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in “the commons” — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.” (What Is CC?). In a very broad sense, Creative Commons gives more flexibility to the usage of works that are created and more control of that flexibility to the creator. On the website, the creator has the option of four different licenses with which they can protect their works: Share Alike, Attribution, Non-Commercial, and No Derivative Works (Licenses). A “Share Alike” license allows for users to create works that are based off of the original piece as long as what they are then doing is covered under the “Share Alike” license as well. This license represents a symbiotic relationship that a work can attain in a seemingly continuous loop of sharing. “Attribution” licenses allow people to use, copy or distribute the original work for their purposes as long as the author is given proper credit, and the Creative Commons website is actually licensed under this code. As the name might suggest, a “Non-Commercial” license gives a user the ability to use a work for anything other than commercial endeavors. Finally “No Derivative Works” comes the closest to the common Copyright as it allows people to copy or distribute the work but forbids people from using it to create new works in any other way. Creative Commons has created a system that is based on the original laws of Copyright and made it more accessible. The words that are used to describe the different licenses above are similar, if not exactly like, the words they use to describe the licenses on their website. Creative commons has entered the scene to fill gaps in copyright that have been created by the internet. By lifting the veil of legal code and legal jargon and making licenses more understandable to the digital generations of today, it will help in creating a freer and safer environment for the sharing of information that will include people being able to use works to create new and creative things with them, thus furthering and fostering more creativity on the internet.
Piracy:
An age of mass availability of information confounded with massive amounts of licenses surrounding this information has led people to develop ways around the law of the licenses and obtain things illegally. Online, this illegal seizure of information or works is known as piracy. The term itself leads one to believe that it is a sinister act, only perpitrated by the lowest criminals, yet piracy is probably one of the most often committed crime by the most diverse set of people. Piracy has its advocates of people who believe that all information should flow freely and should be available for people to use for their own purposes in creating things that are new and innovative. Lawrence Lessig, a prominent writer on the code behind licenses points out the negative effects that fights over ownership can have on people and their use of these works as he writes, “Yet our attention is not focused on these creators. It is focused instead upon “the pirates.” We wage war against these “pirates”; we deploy extraordinary social and legal resources in the absolutely failed effort to get them to stop “sharing” This war must end” (Lessig). On the other hand, enemies of piracy believe that the people who create things are entitled to protecting their works and deciding if they want them shared or used. One of the main downfalls of piracy is that the people who have created works are not given the proper credit for their creation and therefore do not get the money that accompanies that credit. “The rights of authors, performers, publishers, broadcasters, and many others whose livelihoods depend upon the recognition of rights in intellectual property, particularly of copyright, are too often ignored by persons intentionally, deliberately, and systematically attempting to profit from the creations of others” (Panthiere) Piracy not only hurts the creators but also “online copyright infringement undermines not only America's world-leading, job-creating creative industries -- but also our world-leading, job-creating Internet pioneers, like Microsoft, Apple, eBay, Amazon, Comcast and Google” (Sydnor). However YouTube embraces this practice of stealing as it identifies it's “enemies [as] copyright-enforcing "bastards" and "a-holes."” and states that, "probably 75%-80% of our views come from copyrighted material" (Sydnor). Piracy aids in giving people access to works or information that is supposed to be protected. In turn, this access may lead to an increase of creativity, but at the risk of legal action. One thing remains clear, and that is that if people wish information to be more free then they should take legal means to obtain that information or work to make the obtaining of the information legal rather than this blatantly illegal venture.
Digital Being:
The internet creates a sense of identity that seems separate than that of the real world, yet in reality the internet and any identity one creates are merely extensions of your being. Joohan Kim, a professor at Yonsei University in Korea writes in his paper The Phenomenology of Digital Being that “due to its perfect duplicability, digital being can exist at multiple locations simultaneously-that is, it defies normal spatiotemporal constraints” (Kim). People are constantly grappling with ownership and their rights in this constantly changing environment. Copyright allows for a feeling of security over a digital being that is normally considered fluid and changeable. Facebook allows profile pictures to be changed as much as the user wants, new videos can be posted on YouTube, new user names can be created on instant messengers, but when you boil it down it is still connected to the person that creates it. HTML, Perl, and many other digital codes create the objects we see online and most take these codes for granted. However, someone is at their computers typing up these codes as I am sitting here typing this paper and that authorship and creativity is undeniable and inescapably protected. Copyright helps to establish and protect the individual in a realm where that seems nearly impossible. With more users discovering the internet and the digital topography fluctuating on a daily basis one is faced with a world that is hard to navigate as an individual and discovering one's idea of his or her own digital being.
The Future
The future of Copyright and the creativity that it effects remains shrouded in mystery as new issues are presented to it everyday. In its current state, Copyright hinders the use of works and thus of creativity by not only protecting the author, but layering the work itself with massive amounts of red tape that are constantly hindering the ability for these things to be available. Fortunately, Copyright has been evolving with our time and has taken the mistakes and difficulties of the past along with it to create Creative Commons in an effort to release some of the information that has long been penned up and allow creativity to flow within this information to create new ideas, art, etc. In history we see cyclical patterns for great empires that rise to the top only to crumble and fall; Copyright has seen a great number of peaks, but has yet to see a decline that it couldn't contend with as it continuously faces and addresses the problems that it is faced with. Creativity throughout the ages has waxed and waned with many outside interferences, but many fear that the digital age has provided the final blow to creativity and that people will succumb to the ease of duplication rather than take the effort to create something new and original. With services like Creative Commons, and surely many others to come, entering at this fork in the road, one can hope that these new versions of old licenses can help revitalize the creativity pool and can stimulate more original works for our future generations.
Conclusion:
Copyrights have been able to evolve as it has with Creative Commons and with the growth of technology. It seems as though it will not fall by the wayside, another victim of the internet to be taken over by something newer and more modern. Surviving over two hundred years Copyright, and the code that surrounds it appears to be a force to be reckoned with and something that will remain constant. As for Creativity, we have seen many new things come from our time such as Modern Art and even the new wave of digital art that the internet is producing. Our digital beings are seeking stability and protection from deletion by employing both the Copyright of the past and the evolution of Creative Commons. In this age creativity is a commodity that is used to trade for things such as opinions and money. If this commodity cannot be protected then it says little of the society we live in. Currently, Creative Commons provides a great solution to people who are trying to both give and gain access to works online. In turn, this means that the base code of Copyright is gaining a deeper understanding by the generation of today and has a better chance of surviving for the generations of tomorrow to help them not only navigate the torrents of information that will have since become available, but also to help maintain the amount of comfort that comes from knowing that our ownership of our works is stable. Some say that authors never die as long as their works are being read or thought about; if that is true then humanity's wish to be immortal is only a Copyright away.

Works Cited
"ACA Core Values & Principles." Web. 24 Mar. 2010. .
Bellis, Mary. "The History of the Internet - Tim Berners-Lee." Inventors. Web. 24 Mar. 2010. .
Boyle, James. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Yale UP, 2010. Print.
Century, The 18th. "Creativity." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 22 Mar. 2010. .
"Creativity | Define Creativity at Dictionary.com." Dictionary.com | Find the Meanings and Definitions of Words at Dictionary.com. Web. 23 Mar. 2010. .
"Information Circular." U.S. Copyright Office. Web. 22 Mar. 2010. .
Kim, Joohan. "Phenomenology of Digital Being." Springer. JSTOR, 2001. Web. 29 Mar. 2010. .
"Licenses." Creative Commons. Web. 22 Mar. 2010. .
Panethiere, Darrell. "THE PERSISTENCE OF PIRACY: THE CONSEQUENCES FOR CREATIVITY, FOR CULTURE, AND FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT." The Global Alliance for Cultural Diversity. UNESCO, 2005. Web. 09 Apr. 2010. .
Sydnor, Thomas. "Thomas Sydnor: Viacom v. YouTube: Internet Piracy Destroys Creativity." Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post. 31 Mar. 2010. Web. 10 Apr. 2010. .
"What Is CC?" Creative Commons. Web. 17 Mar. 2010.
.

" class=