FAIR USE/ TRANSFORMATIVE USE 

Every day people get into trouble violating copyright law. Copyright law has always been very strict, but one thing that has always bugged me is that most of the time the people violating the law are not doing it to hurt others, or take credit for their actions, they are just trying to increase their own knowledge on certain subjects and expand their own creative process.

Fair Use, and its even more complicated counterpart, Transformative Use, give people the ability to use previously copyrighted material to create new things without getting into trouble with the law. Kind of. It is not an exact system and the court judges in control hold all the power.

Girl Talk has been using fair use and transformative use to create an entirely new style of hit music. Girl Talk take previously written beats and lyrics and combines them with each other to create something completely new. Well, its new in his eyes, the music industry does not agree.

In my opinion Girl Talk is doing nothing wrong, especially since he is not selling his work as his own. Girl Talk represents the work he is using fairly and admits that it is not his, only that he is using it in his creative process. Why can he not use music in such a revolutionary way? His music makes people happy, it makes people dance and laugh. Why is his process so wrong and what is different about what he does that the people who originally wrote the music were not doing?

The point of music is to make people feel good, laugh, dance, feel. The music industry is just made because the billions of dollars they are already making is not enough for them. The documentary we watched in class about Girl Talk stated four things about the past, the future, and how the creative process is the only thing we have to make a better future for ourselves. Limiting our control keeps us in the dark and kills our hopes at a brighter future.