Different Views on Copyright Laws

     I just read two very interesting articles with contrasting views on the laws of copyright. Both articles were very interesting and produced valid reasoning for their points of view. After I had finished reading the articles I could not take a side for either one because I felt like both of them were sound arguments.

     The first one I read was about was from the point of view that copyright laws are essential to protect the producers of the information. He brought up a great viewpoint and talked about an animated Disney film that had taken four years to produce because so much new technology and been invented just for the one film to be produced. He also went into depth about how when the film was being created massive amounts of information had to be compacted and condensed on many separate computers just so that all the time and effort could be saved. He said all this to say that even though millions of dollars had been put into the project along with countless man hours it could all be undone if just one copy of the movie was prematurely copied and put on the internet. Not only would the Disney company lose money because people would be able to access the movie for free via the internet the anticipation and eagerness for people to see the movie would be dimmed because it could be freely accessed through the internet. This argument had many valid points and showed how copyright laws were essential to protect peoples ideas, money, and work.

     The second article did not completely disagree with the fact that copyright was needed but rather put a different spin on the subject. The man point of view from the writer of the second article was that for people to continue to invent and  develop new ideas they would need free access to works from the past. One quote the author repeated multiple times was, "Creativity and innovation always build on the past." I thought that this quote put a lot of things in perspective; one thing I think you can get out of it is that in order for people to evolve and come up with new ideas they would need access to prior works so that they could learn from previous works and ideas. In some ways this outlook is good because one can not truly know where he are going until they have seen where they have been. 

     To conclude I think it is fair to say that copyright laws are essential to society but can sometimes hinder creativity because information is not always easily accessible to people.