Digital archiving, curation, and digital rights go hand in hand. Digital archiving is collections of digital information that people can access. Curation is assembling or presenting a type of collection. Digital rights are the rights of individuals that relates to using, creating, or publishing digital media. For a content creator to to legally and ethically digitally curate content, they must follow the guidelines of digital rights. However, it can be hard to follow the guidelines when they’re blurry. For example, the issue of sampling music is discussed in Copyright Criminals. While you may think there would be a clear cut set of rules for how artists should sample music, how much they can sample, and who gets paid how much. But there no real rules set for sampling, and everyone in the industry, from lawyers, producers, and musicians, has different opinions on whether or not sampling should be allowed. The main issue with sampling is that usually when artists sample a part of a song, they mix it so it sounds different than the original. So is it considered stealing if the sample is different from the original?
Lessig also discusses issues with digital rights in his book “Free Culture”. For instance, Lessig talks about how a lot of things such as the radio, cable TV, and recorded music were born out of piracy. Essentially, it’s very hard to avoid borrowing or stealing other artists’ work. So setting rules and guidelines for this situation is very hard.
Melissa Hookey - dtcfall2018 