Diane Graves Copyright Discussion

I found the topic of fair use to be quite interesting. All of the rules and regulations that have been passed as law seem very trivial to me. I feel like these companies have gone too far in order to squeeze out a few extra dollars. People are getting sued for thousands of dollars for illegally downloading music yet the musicians suing them are showing up to court in their Bentley's. I have used limewire all of my life but now that I am on a college campus I refrain because the consequences are not worth risking it. I can't believe that people sit at a computer all day trying to find these "pirates." The world has always been full of greed and there are no signs of it slowing down.

Mrs. Graves mentioned how if a teacher uses a piece of copyrighted material for class use, he or she has to pay a certain amount per student. Even if the author of the material died 50 years ago, they would still have to pay. Seriously people, it's for class use intended for learning. No one is trying to "steal" this material and claim they wrote. No one is selling this material for a lower price in order to make money. Yes, give credit to the author, but paying money to someone that is dead is pure insanity.

The proponents of the current copyright laws will claim they are protecting the authors. They are protecting them by lining their pockets. They are not motivated by making sure plagiarism is not going on, but they are motivated by greed. I believe that instead of creating further laws to either increase protection or decrease protection, we should look back to when this country was created. They had simple laws for a simple time. They wouldn't put up with people downloading a ton of illegal information and selling it for money, but they wouldn't crack down on kids getting a few songs off limewire. I realize that there are many ways that people can violate copyright laws these days, but the current laws will never be able to stop it from going on. The laws only further corporate America's dominance over society.

Facebook: What do I think?

Facebook is something that that everyone I am friends with uses. It's something we use to talk to each other and look at one another's pictures. But people use it for other things too. There are a ton of groups in Facebook that have gained a lot more followers than if the group was started through a paper or website. After reading the Facebook article on The Christian Science Montitor's website (link: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1213/p13s01-legn.html), I was not surprised at all. I know there is a lot of controversy over the ways people use Facebook, but we all knew that would happen.

Yes, I agree that some people can take things too far with hate groups and a lot of kids are just stupid when they put pictures up of themselves doing drugs. However, banning Facebook altogether on a college campus is not logical as most kids use Facebook in a mature fashion. I also think that firing someone because of their facebook is not valid. On the other hand, if an employer sees that the person has irresponsible pictures up, then firing would be valid, just because the person is an idiot not to have taken the pictures down. I think pictures with drinking involved are acceptable, and if someone was fired because of that then I think that would be a problem. All in all, just be smart about using Facebook.

I've been using Facebook for about two years now and to be honest, I wish it was never created. It is just another way for me to procrastinate. Instead of chatting with someone over Facebook I would call them and wouldn't think twice. Now that it is here, it's here to stay. I truly believe that Facebook further dehumanizes us because it actually pushes us farther apart. We are so caught up in technology that face to face conversations have lost their value. Anyways, that's another topic. Thanks for reading my post!