Protecting Yourself And Your Art : Social Media And The Fight For Ownership

“To appropriate is to borrow. Appropriation is the practice of creating a new work by taking a pre-existing image from another context—art history, advertising, the media—and combining that appropriated image with new ones. Or, a well-known artwork by someone else may be represented as the appropriator’s own. Such borrowings can be regarded as the two-dimensional equivalent of the found object. But instead of, say, incorporating that “found” image into a new collage, the postmodern appropriator redraws, repaints, or rephotographs it.”

‘Copying, reinterpreting, quoting, and translating are all terms that have been utilised as alternative descriptions for the phenomenon known as “appropriation”, the action of taking or making use of something without authority or legal right. This practice often involves borrowing, mimicking, or even stealing, and it is highly contested and criticized in the contemporary art world’ (Gorman, C 2013, p. 215). Appropriation in the postmodern decade brings various aspects such as cultural exchange and finding identity. From the number of contemporary artists used the appropriation in their artwork covers a wide range of media. Appropriation art, sometimes cause responses varying from astonishment and suspicion to praise and acceptance, depend

Throughout history, the issue of appropriation in art has become a heated debate on whether it is good or whether it is bad. Appropriation is fundamentally the act of taking something from somewhere else and placing it into a new context. In art, appropriation is seen as using (or taking) someone else's artwork, manipulating it and ultimately changing the whole meaning behind the work. It is seen as a significant issue as many people (including art critics, art historians and art enthusiasts) see appropriation as whilst, others see it as being inappropriate and immoral, and see the growth in appropriation as being a destroyer of art. It is of the opinion that art indeed "feeds off itself" and every artwork, art movement, and art period is

An example of appropriation is Charles Meere’s oil on wax on cardboard artwork titled ‘Australian Beach Pattern’ which was appropriated by modern day artist Anne Zahalka titled ‘The Bathers, from the series Bondi: playground of the Pacific’ in 1990. The use of appropriation is clearly adopted by Zahalka from Meere’s artwork evident through the setting in which is a beach side on the sand for both, featuring individuals and families from a range of age groups all participating in a certain activity. They are both busy landscapes with a lot of clutter and disorder, they are detailed and have many aspects to the artworks. It is obvious that Meere’s artwork was

"Do you agree or disagree that laws relating to copyright and intellectual property are still valid in social media?"

When it comes to appropriation in artistic practices, I feel as though there are two defining lines or codes of ethics that relate to the topic in a creative context and with a cultural context – artistic appropriation, the topic of artistic freedom in practices that reference or borrow existing elements of other work, and cultural appropriation, the issue which spans between being ‘inspired’ by other cultural groups to potential exploitation, a lack of representation to a caricaturistic type of racism. The two types of appropriation are complex, controversial, and often come together to form two sides of the same argument – do we have the right to borrow and if so, from whom and how?

Is Vanilla Ice's song “Ice, Ice, Baby” an example of plagiarism? Of course, it is, and Robert Matthew Van Winkle, who known professionally as Vanilla Ice knows it. Vanilla Ice became famous for a while, not because of his talent, but because of the copyright of someone else baseline. Some people said that since the words were not the same, then it wasn't plagiarism. It was just an artist sampling another artist's music which happens all the time. To me, I believe that this is an example of plagiarism. Vanilla Ice can't go and change one beat in someone's music and call it new and original without giving the person any credit. He thought changing the rhythm of David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” baseline and not giving him credit would avoid him from any trouble. Vanilla Ice’s song “Ice, Ice, Baby” is an example of plagiarism, with evidence provided of what he did wrong, and what he could have done to avoid this type of consequences.

according to which whoever intended to copy, print or share an art work made by

Today’s digital artists work in an environment where information and access to design inspiration are, literally, at their fingertips. Many in the industry use the artwork of others in order to inspire their on artwork and provide content for their projects. However, I have noticed that many fail to give the proper credit to the artists’ whose work(s). Digital media and internet has transformed the world of copyrights in many ways. The digital environment has made it very easy to distribute and re-distribute content (Kankanala,2012).

These are all guesses, however. At the very least, there is some possibility, even hope, that we could have a world in which much more of intellectual and inventive production is free. “‘Free’ as in ‘free speech,’” Richard Stallman says, not “‘free’ as in ‘free beer.’”61 But we could hope that much of it would be both free of centralized control and low cost or no cost. When the marginal cost of production is zero, the marginal cost of transmission and storage approaches zero, the process of creation is additive, and much of the labor doesn’t charge—well, the world looks a little different.62 This is at least a possible future, or part of a possible future, and one that we should not foreclose without thinking twice. Yet that is what we are doing. The Database Protection Bills and Directives, which extend intellectual property rights to the layer of facts;63 the efflorescence of software patents;64 the UCITA-led validation of shrink wrap licenses that bind third parties;65 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions66 — the point of all of these developments is not merely that they make the peer-to peer model difficult, but that in many cases they rule it out altogether. The free software and open-source software movements have produced software that rivals and, many would say, exceeds the capabilities of conventional proprietary, binary-only software. 52 Its adoption on the “enterprise level” is impressive, as is the number and

“Intellectual Property”(IP) provides an intangible property rights protecting a product or creations, and regulates the uses of different sorts of ideas and insignia such as industrial design, literature, and artistic works inclusive of symbols, names and images. It is enforced by means of patented inventions, copyrights and trademarks where each protects distinct subject matter and promotes a unique social goal. Patent law protects functional products, processes and designs. The inventions must be new, useful, and non obvious to a person skilled in the relevant art. Copyright law protect expressive works where it has to be original, incrementally creative, and fixed in a tangible medium of expression.

The ubiquity of Web 2.0 services has transformed the ways in which we consume content online. With the Web, content producers can reach an audience in numbers inconceivable through conventional channels. Social media has ultimately revolutionised the exchange between producers and consumers, as it is now possible on a global scale. Content on social media sites such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and so on are continuously submitted, perused, rated and discussed by the user community.

There has always been the challenge of protecting the copyright of digital content, yet the proliferation of social media websites and platforms, the ease

Performers frequently describe a system of rules as being open source or free software. The term open source adverts to thing that people can change and share because of the reason that, its design is publicly approachable. This term developed in the context of software evolution to delegate a particular approach to make computer programs. Nowadays, nevertheless, open source delegates a wider set of values that we call as the open source way.

The social media revolution has been led by Twitter and Facebook. Twitter and Facebook combined have over 750 million users. (Carpenter) Along with new comers, Instagram, Pinterest, and host of lesser known mediums; opportunities for copyright infringement have substantially increased. Along with this ease of access comes the challenge to monitor one’s self for sharing content. Social media can make gaining sharing music, books, photos, articles, and video media easier and can cause individuals, community groups, and businesses, among a few, to commit copyright infringement without realizing the mistake.