Astrophotography

http://heritage.stsci.edu/2003/20/index.html

When I was thinking about potential topics for my blog and video, I kept coming back to astronomy. I took an astronomy intro course as an elective a few semesters ago and ended up keeping the textbook because I wanted to be able to learn more about it after the class ended.

I couldn't think of a subtopic that would be interesting and specific enough for this class until I came across the Hubble Heritage Project's website at heritage.stsci.edu. They create colorful, sharp pictures of nebulas, galaxies, and other astronomical features by manipulating images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The images are black and white, grainy, and not very impressive before the Heritage Project improves them.

The process of beautifying the images is complex and very interesting, so I researched it and found that astrophotography is done both by professionals and by amateurs with smaller telescopes and cameras. I'm looking forward to learning more about the process of both the photography and editing aspects of the field.

Lessig's "Remix"



http://disquiet.com/2009/03/15/shelf-empowerment-sampling-lessigs-remix


Lawrence Lessig has many seemingly radical ideas about what consitutes copyright infringement versus freedom of expression. He makes a lot of good points in the preface, introduction, and first chapter of Remix, but raises some questions that are likely addressed later in the book.

Some of the case studies that Lessig posits are (to me, at least) clearly scenarios in which copyright law has gone too far--for instance, the story of a mother who shared a video on Youtube of her baby dancing to a Prince song. Lessig's argument was that the audio was unclear and the video obviously not meant to gain a profit or detract from Prince's sales. He's right; if this were a case of common sense, the mother would not be at fault. Unfortunately, the law often seems to serve the interests of corporations rather than subscribing to what most people would view as common sense.

The case in which the exhibit created by John Lennon fans using his songs and their voices was denied permissions by Yoko Ono was a case involving what could be called common decency rather than common sense. It seems as though in this particular instance, allowing the group to display the exhibit, which was garnering no profit, was simply the polite thing to do. It would have not only sent a message to fans that they are always appreciated but would have, very simply, been a kind act. Instead, Ono and her lawyers turned a small matter into a large, laborious, and arguably unnecessary process.

I'm interested to read about how Lessig rationalizes the use of peer-to-peer exchange. He seems to contradict himself during the first part of his book: first he says that we are criminalizing an entire generation of people who will inevitably use P2P websites and programs, but he then goes on to say:

Companies like YouTube are deluged with demands to remove material from their systems. No doubt a significant portion of those demands are fair and justified. If you’re Viacom, funding a new television series with high-priced ads, it is perfectly understandable that when a perfect copy of the latest episode is made available on YouTube, you would be keen to have it taken down. Copyright law gives Viacom that power by giving it a quick and inexpensive way to get the YouTubes of the world to help it protect its rights.

Here, Lessig seems to be on Viacom's side, against the perfect-copy-providers of the world. However, P2P sharing provides HD copies of TV shows, as well as DVD releases, PDFs of books, music, games, software, and an other type of file that could possibly be transmitted and stored electronically. I'm curious to discover Lessig's stand on P2P sharing--is it inevitable but not really harmful and therefore permissible, or damaging and therefore wrong? Or would he propose selective P2P sharing, as websites like Mininova and isoHunt have been forced to adopt, so that only content willfully shared by its creators is allowed to be distributed?

I'll probably continue reading Remix in my spare time to learn about Lessig's proposed course of action.

Letham's "Give All" Philosophy

Letham's view on plagiarism is that artists should be proud of their work and grateful that others wish to adapt, borrow, or build on it in order to create new art. He believes that while the more concrete aspects of a work should belong to the artist, others should be free to use the idea or concept of that work in their own material.

His view is extremely idealistic, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it fails to take into account the very human desire for revenue. Artists and authors want to be recognized for their labors, but many would be upset by the idea that their unique concepts were being used without their consent, particularly if money was being made by using those concepts. As Letham argues, however, even these so-called 'original' ideas contain aspects of others' work--nothing created today is truly original.

The line separating plagiarism from acceptable adaptation is thin and extremely blurred. Copyright law attempts to define the boundary, but realistically, this would require a concrete decision about how 'original' an idea has to be before the creator can consider it to be his/her property. Similarly, a decision must be made as to how much borrowing or adaptation is permissible once a work has been claimed as someone's property.

I suspect that there will never be a clear-cut answer to the questions that Letham raises. Some artists will always wish to own their work, and other artists will always wish to mold that work into their own interpretation.