The Molotov Man reading seemed to remind me of our assignment which requires us to collect recycled footage. The idea of getting in copyright issues is a very scary thought and one which is similar to something that worries me when writing papers. Here and at home, we are always dealing with recycled work and plagiarism is very much banned in essay writing and is given severe punishments. At home, we hand in our papers online through a program called Turnitin. Once you have submitted your paper, the program scans your paper for any copied work, using thousands of books, scholarly articles and websites as reference. Once it has finished, it will give you a percentage of how much is ‘plagiarised’ although usually it will just be the bibliography or the odd sentence. However, it is a very useful tool because if you do have a problem, you can remove the plagiarised section and re-submit. It was interesting to read Sue Meisela’s perspective of her piece of art and her view of plagiarism. I agree with her in that it seems significant to work hard to put art into context in order to allow less manipulation to the work. Nowadays, particularly with YouTube, many pieces of art are copied or made into a parody and it must be questioned where the line can be drawn. For example, Rebecca Black, the singer of ‘Friday’, whose music video went viral on YouTube has now had lots of parodies made and people have taken apart her video and manipulated it. Should that really be allowed? (I have included one of the parody videos below which is pretty funny if you've seen the original!)
Again, with ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’, Lethem discusses the idea of plagiarism and influence. Thinking about influence is very interesting to me. I am currently writing a paper for another class in which my professor has told us to write something original which has not been discussed before. That is a very hard task because there is a lot of writing on the films and time frame that we are looking at, so you cannot help but be influenced by what other people have written previously. Although imitation can be considered copying, it is also said to be the highest form of flattery... so maybe it’s not all that bad! Like the article says, without imitation there would be no ‘South Park’, amongst other shows. I was actually watching TV yesterday when an advert came on for the ‘Shake Weight’. My friend and I then looked it up on YouTube because it was amusing and found that ‘South Park’ had taken the idea and incorporated it into their show for comedic purposes. I had to admit it was funny, even if the makers of the ‘Shake Weight’ didn’t like it!
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