Copyright Reading Response

What would the creative world be like if it weren't for the copyright laws the James Madison set into place so many years ago? Without the copyright laws, would we have to cite our sources like we do today? What is the concept of DMCA and why is it so dangerous?

These copyright articles were very informative on the different aspects of copyright, from the beginning of the laws up until the current details on it. I think it is very interesting to think about what the world would be like without a copyright law. In the Vaidhyanathan article it was interesting when the point was brought up that without copyright, people could reproduce and resell an authors original work and sell it for their own profit, even though it has nothing to do with them. I like the idea that people have the right to claim their "intellectual property" as their own, that way no one gets to take the creativity of another, or claim it as their own. I did not know that something has a copyright immediately as you write it, as long as it is original, even if it is just on a napkin. I did not understand the concept of the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act. I found this part of the article to be very hard to understand and it even repeats one part in a kind of redundant way. I don't understand how not allowing people to break through electronic gates to the work would cause people to copy and abuse someone's work.