Week 10 Lab: More TED Talks

The Human Brain. Source.

Copyright is Brain Damage by Nina Paley. Source.

Paley's TED Talk covers how copyright has many detriments, including preventing the flow of culture, no additional benefits to the actual creator, etc. Overall, Paley calls herself a copyright abolitionist because any change in the laws and legislation would occur well after a human lifetime. I disagreed with a lot of Paley's talk. One of her arguments is that as copyright is traded between corporations and that the creator does not really benefit from copyright. Paley even mentions that copyright has not earned her any more money.

I argue that copyright allows creators to earn money in the first place. Yes, copyright is traded between corporations, but the reasons corporations own the copyright in the first place is because the original creator benefited from giving them rights to their art. Without money as an incentive, corporations would not be invested in art for the advertisement and production of it. In addition to this point, who would buy art such as a film when they could easily obtain a free version online. The level of consumers would drop of art was allowed to be shared everywhere, so what monetary value would it have.

And as much as people don't like to think about it, money is deeply involved in art. Aside from the money used to gather supplies to create the art, there is an upkeep cost as well. Overtime, mediums of art such paint degrade over time by chemical reactions with the air. The job is delicate enough for specialists to be required to reverse these reactions so the art retains its beauty. If no one pays to see the art, how can museums pay to conserve the art.

I agree that copyright laws are incredibly absurd, but the complete abolition that Paley describes sounds more harmful than anything else. Piracy is not a victimless crime, yet Paley says that people should use whatever art inspires them, no matter the license they fall under. If people did as Paley suggests and ignore copyright, aside from the legal consequences, the corporations would take a blow. If you do not think this is a loss, I would like to remind that a corporation may have strict businessmen on top but the people under them are just trying to make a living. If corporations lose profit, thousands of people could lose their jobs.

Another point Paley makes is that her art becomes lesser with a copyright filter, and she is correct. The work she created without the copyright material would have less substance. However, why did Paley want to use copyright source in the first place for her film's score. There are plenty of young artists who would greatly appreciate the chance to create a score, yet Paley is insistent on using already well-known art. Paley claims copyright hinders culture, but doesn't it play a part for opportunities for new artists to make their mark? I say that the use of copyrighted materials allows new ideas to spread and if after the copyright period of time a piece is still a classic, then it has made a large enough cultural impact to be worth using for the rest of time.



A New Theory of Human Intelligence by Scott Barry Kaufman. Source.

This TED talk focused on the story of a man who was rejected into a program because of his early test scores. Instead, he joins the university under another major and transfers into his preferred department. He started out as someone diagnosed as mentally impaired to getting accepted into Yale for graduate school. He describes how schools focus on past scores rather than the professional and innovative people that students want to become. 

I thought the points in this TED talk were incredibly obvious. My generation is fully aware of the problems of the American school system and attempts to improve it. For example, the No Child Left Behind legislation was made to penalize school districts with students with bad scores and reward school districts with good scores. However, if a student was doing badly in school, how could reduced resources help them improve? Changes to the SAT in recent years, such as the reduced emphasis on vocabulary are an improvement, but the SAT still has such a rigid structure that allows no leeway. 

Some students are easily confused by how a question is worded but they can describe a chemical process or historical event with a teacher's fluency. However, these students do worse on the SAT because the test is mainly multiple choice.

Another point is that when I took the ACT, there were questions about how to fix a single sentence. Except, I thought the whole sentence sounded unnatural. I would have rewritten the whole paragraph, but this was not in options A through D.

The one point from Kaufman that I agree most-whole heartedly with is that we need to treat unique traits of a student as co-abilities, not disabilities. I wholeheartedly agree with this. People diagnosed with some mental impairment are so often treated as lesser and it breaks my heart to hear or see any of it. As a premed, I get most riled up by idiots saying that vaccines cause autism. First of all, no they do not. Secondly, would you really rather have your own child die from debilitating diseases than have an autistic child. People with mental disorders such as autism still live perfectly normal lives.

Most of the time, we don't know a person is autistic unless they tell us they are. The reason for this is that autistic people may have difficulties but they can adjust as any other person. The same goes for any person with low test scores in their early life. People change over time and, as Kaufman said, should be allowed to live outside the scores other people assign to them.