Students will work in pairs to perform a 4-5 minute battle of audio collected from the Internet. Think of it as Girl Talk meets Street Fighter II, but with streaming songs/sounds as fireballs (“HADOUKEN!!!”). Students are to create individual personas, with corresponding sonic styles (and maybe even special moves). They are to rehearse this battle to become comfortable with their performance and work out any potential technical problems. Students will meet at an undetermined location at an undetermined (probably night-) time and perform the Webspinna battle. Students will be asked to bring food, friends and family to enjoy the evening. Prizes for the best character design, cosplay, battle, etc. will be awarded.
These are a few of my thoughts after completing the Webspinna activity listed in the description above.
Firstly, I found that my love of being a massive show-boater has not changed. I immensely enjoy parading around dramatically in front of a large audience. Also, Prof. Thevenin was entirely correct when he said, "prepare to become best friends with everyone after this night". Or something akin to that. Nothing like a bit of outrageous show-boating to break the ice.
Secondly, the Webspinna battle calls into mind the reality of the creative process: any component of our end product is pulled from an existing source. There is no creation without borrowing ideas.
But wait, what about the whole hot mess of copyright laws? What about the heinous sin of plagiarism, a topic that comprised 67% of our Junior-High English class syllabus? It's still true that all art is thievery. But it only becomes frowned upon when you borrow from a certain conglomeration of ideas while the last person to benefit financially from those ideas---is still benefitting from those ideas.
Specifically, trouble arises if your use of the ideas significantly detracts from the prior user's ability to benefit financially.
This is the real concern hidden behind plagiarism: the risk of reducing the financial income of the last person to benefit from the use of those ideas. AKA if your brilliant idea is too similar to mine, and your copycat product endangers my ability to profit from my use of the idea, then I will be angry. However, if an idea is borrowed, and the prior investor in that idea does not stand to lose anything financially, then there is no foul. People are generally only protective of their ideas when their livelihood rests on their ideas. An exception to this is when the maintenance of the purity of an idea is a person's theological or philosophical goal, for example, the goal of many Christians to preserve the "traditional" meaning of the term "marriage". However, if one considers it, the difference between financial and theological/philosophical goals is not so different: one pertains the maintenance of physical livelihood, and the other, to the maintenance of intellectual livelihood.
Therefore, what people are concerned about when they claim to be concerned with plagiarism, is not a concern with stealing ideas. The real concern is one of livelihood. We should keep that in mind. There is nothing wrong with using external ideas. The real wrong is the reckless endangerment of the livelihood of others. After all, when a person invests their time in the development, organization and promotion of a certain compilation of ideas in the endeavor to make a living, the original pure ideas become entangled with the time they have invested. To partake of those ideas would not be merely taking ideas, but it would also be taking freely of the time of the individual who invested in conglomerating those ideas into a more developed form. So yes, we should feel free to access the many ideological resources around us, but we should be certain to borrow ideas and resources in an ethical manner, so that we are not wasting the time of individuals who have worked to refine those ideas.
In conclusion, ideas should be free. Ideas should be made available for the betterment of all mankind. However, mankind must also pay tribute to those who invest time in the refining of ideas, or else our legions of idea-developers will dwindle, unable to make a living. However, once those idea-makers, once those creatives are dead and gone, we should recognize that their need to make a livelihood has also passed away with them, and their ideas should be made available for all mankind to benefit from. Which... they are.
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