In Class Writing

I completely agree with the "Everything is a Remix" videos. I think it is something that the public does not think about very often. We are often telling each other not to copy or use someone else's work but then are told to be creative and original. As we grow up, teachers often mislead students to associate copying with cheating. If we copy, we cheat. That was the rule. But these videos show that there is almost no such thing as an original idea. Everything is adapted from something else. Without copying, we cannot grow or learn. We learned to speak a language from copying our parents or other influences. Without mimicking them, we could not learn to do those things. The videos also make a clear boundary between using copying to grow and using copying to cheat or gain an advantage. By using the work of others, we can adapt and create our own works to help us grow as an individual or a society. Another thing I liked about the videos was that the narrator pointed our that copying the works of others is okay as long as we aren't the ones being copied. Our species is very territorial. We naturally do not like to share things. But we learn to do so. Other times we still chose not to share. When someone does something successful and then someone else uses that idea to gain their own success, we feel as though our success was stolen from us. That leads to all the lawsuits on copyright infringement. If we were to never use someone else's idea to create our own, creativity would be at an all-time low and making any sort of advancement would be difficult. The human species has grown by using the ideas of others to create new and better things.