Today we began the class with this question, how do you acquire property without taking it by force?

Our class answer comes from john locke, who says, “a deer cant own property because it cant valor, they just live there, they did not mix their labor”. So they had no claim to ownership. BUT we began to argue in class that the mindset presented by Locke does not work in every situation that it is wrong because Indians that we kicked off the land they had settled on, did in fact labor. We then broke into what about ideas are they an example of mixing ones labor with the earth? The United States early on developed a notion of intellectual property and dominant forms of intellectual property. The idea of patents, trademarks, copyright- if its not a part of any of those a work would be in the public domain, which means it belongs to everyone and no one.

I laughed reading those articles about whether or not happy birthday is a copy right infringement because like honestly who cares, but I get it, that people do actually care about those things. But I just struggle with the idea of copy right because if the person is not trying to make money off of your idea, why do you care? I see people all the time create really great videos on YouTube with songs in the background and the videos get taken down because of copy right infringement which personally I think is a silly concept.

Next we spent time speaking about corporations in class, which basically is a fictitious legal person of an entity created by law and endowed with the rights of natural persons..what even is that definition it does not make any sense. The idea of corporations is so foreign to me, like how can a corporation, own land, pay wages, testify in court. Professor used an interesting phrase to break down corporation today which helped further my understanding, he called a corporation a “disembodied immortal being” which an example is disney.

The following class we broke down the idea of sampling and starting pulling out songs out of the news that actually came from other songs of the past, I do not know why, but it makes me kind of mad that all songs just come from samples. Not because they borrowed the music from someone else but like where is the originality, you as a performer, want people pay for your shows, buy your albums, and support you as an artist when you cannot even have the decency to create your own music?