We're felons?

The fact that half of Americans can be defined as felons tells us that the law undoubtedly needs to be changed. I agree with what was brought up in class that because many aspects of the law are unreasonable, people often break it and this can somewhat "desensitize" people to the fact that they are breaking the law and make them feel that it is not a big deal. This reminded me of some history lessons involving Japanese rule over Korea before WWII. (I often heard stories about this topic as I'd lived in Korea for 5 years) I remember hearing people saying that when the Japanese controlled Korea, any Korean that broke the law were treated like heroes since it was an act of standing up to the Japanese government. Many believe that this attitude towards the law that had been created during this time carried over to current times and explains some of the generally careless attitude of the citizens towards the law (more than half a century since Japanese rule ended). One example that comes to mind is when I once took a taxi late at night in Korea the taxi driver ran several red lights when he noticed there were no cars in sight. In Madison I noticed that at midnight the lights all turn into blinking red or yellow lights. Anyway, my point being that laws should be reasonable for people to take them seriously.

Laws against Sampling not good for creativity

This week we watched a film about sampling. I never really thought how someone making a remix from someone else’s song can get into so much trouble. I always assumed that no one would care. After watching the film, I learned that under current laws and regulations, you can’t even pay royalties to sample other people’s work, and even if you had all the money in the world it would take a long time to get through the regulations. I think there’s definitely something wrong there and it sends out a red light in terms of creativity in the music industry. In my opinion, I think sampling should be allowed without permission if it is not for commercial purposes and if it is for commercial purposes paying royalties should be enough as long as it doesn’t somehow hurt the original artist’s profits.

Reflection on Plagiarism assignment

I feel like this assignment was easier than the ghostwriting assignment. My paper was an informative paper on the destruction Cane Toads have caused on the natural habitats of Australia. I learned about the threats of non-native species in a class I took a couple semesters ago. The paper was basically a summary of my lecture notes which came from my textbook and paraphrasing sources that I found on the web. I feel like the topic I chose made it relatively easy to plagiarize because being an informative paper, I didn’t need to include any of my own opinions so all I had to worry about was including relevant information in the paper. Paraphrasing the information that I found was the most difficult because I had to have a good enough understanding of what the source was saying to write it in my own words.

This assignment made me realize that it is actually easier to plagiarize and get away with it than I had previously thought. It seems that as long as you don’t use word-for-word quotes, it is difficult to find out that you plagiarized, at least through google. Originally, I had tried to copy and paste from my sources but I knew I would be caught within 5 minutes so I decided to paraphrase a lot. As a result, my classmates found it fairly hard to find what I did and didn’t plagiarize.