Copyright©

By: Brian Andrews and Tyler Burton

Copyright was instituted to protect artists from the theft of their creative knowledge. This has become quite problematic in recent years with the advances in technology. The ablity to share the vast knowledge of the human race across the internet with anyone in the world has started to blur the lines of copyright. It makes the quality of what is being created diminish because the incentive for earning money goes away when people can access what they created and the authors not be compensated for it.

In recent years the music industry has had to crack down on the so called "sharers" because of their ability to share music with anyone but not paying the artists and/or record companies. Websites such as Napster and Limewire were created to allow media to be shared from Peer to Peer. Napster was shut down by the government after artists sued them for selling their music without permission and without paying them royalties.

There have been groups muscial groups such as the Gregory Brothers who use different material from many sources. Artists should be able to mix and match material from because the songs they are creating, such as the bed intruder are extremely creative and they should be credited with creating an entirely new song. They should ask for permission though for using copyrighted images in their videos, which they probably do, otherwise they would have already been sued.

Shopping for Sources on the Web

By: Brian Andrews and Tyler Burton

The internet is a place of what seems full of limitless knowledge. It can make finding sources to use in papers easier and more accessible, but the reliability can often be called into question.

There are a few ways to determine whether a website is reliable or if one website is more reliable over another. The first thing the researcher will notice is the view of the website; "Does this look like it was well put together?", or, "Is this website sketchy?", would be some questions that should be answered after viewing the website.  Is the author of the article or source someone who is qualified to provide the information for what you are researching?

Online databases are a reliable source to use because they are filled with scholarly articles. When searching for articles you do not want to use sources that are biased on the subject. It has often been said that Wikipedia is not a reputable source because it is edited by random people who may not be qualified. This may change soon though because the editors have the uncanny ability to find errors in articles and have them fixed.