"The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.”

- To actually maintain a blog
- Learned/found out about Project Gutenberg (which is amazing)
- Trained my eyes to pay attention to a book for more than 30 minutes (j/k)

But seriously...

I was introduced to some brilliant literature that I may have never picked up on my own. A different sort of narrative was presented to me and I was up for the challenge, survived, and actually enjoyed it.

I learned to swim to the bottom of the story, to swim through the obstacles of confusion and come back to the surface with new knowledge. I never really thought to look at each individual word and the repetition of certain words. I had previously read most of the required readings before coming into this class, but I came out with even more different interpretations from them.

Copy Cat

I listened to that flash presentation but I still don't really get what Lessig really meant by it all. If anything I think I get his refrain:

1)Creativity and innovation always builds on the past
2)The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it
3)Free societies enable the future by limiting the past
4)Ours is less and less a free society

More and more creativity is becoming entangled in all the rules it has to get through. At the first sign of similarity all hell breaks loose and fingers are pointed. Big labels steal from indie artists, the little guy gets screwed by the faceless corporations that have more power.
But the stuff out there seems all the same anyways; there's just a ton of crap out there.

In general, I believe there should definitely be laws to protect others' creations, but innovation shouldn't be suffocated by these laws. I think people have mainly gotten it right with things like patents expiring after awhile to make room for improvements.

It's just a whole messy ordeal.
There's just so much that can be written/painted about anyways before it starts to seem familiar. There's just enough imagination left though in order to not make it seem blatantly the same.