This Tuesday we read Connected, or What it Means to Live in the Network Society by Steven Shaviro. The reading discusses sampling and if it is considered plagiarism when used in music, but in a different way. We need to first understand what sampling is before trying to make an opinion about plagiarism in music.
Sampling is taking many different things and putting them together. For example, in writing when one writes a research paper or papers in general, one samples other people’s ideas. When you write a paper you combine other texts and ideas to find new meaning behind it. You can also put a direct quote in the paper as long as you site it, which is authorship. Authorship is if you take anything from anyone, you need to credit the original. So, in a paper if you put a “quote” in and you don’t site it, then it is considered plagiarism. A certain amount of what you write has to come from you. Blogs are another example of sampling. In a blog you have links to websites to give examples. You are pulling material from another context to better understand your idea.
In music people take multiple songs and combine them to make their own song. This could be considered plagiarism if the artist did not get the right to use the other artists’ songs. I am starting to understand that if you take something, sample it, but didn’t change the meaning of it and didn’t site the original author then it is stealing, plagiarism. However, if something new comes out of the sampling then maybe it isn’t plagiarism because you formed your own idea about it. Jetter, from the reading, says that “bit by bit every writer has constructed the world inside his head from previously existing texts by others.” So actually any idea that someone constructs is actually in some way taken from someone else, everything we do is plagiarized or stolen in some way.
2 comments:
it's kind of weird to think that a lot of what we hear or read really is from someone other than the source we're getting it from. it's pretty rare to find something that is completely original especially with all of the ways to find and get information.
I agree with your statement that in a sense, nothing is orginal-we are always using someone else's ideas. This is what greatly confuses the topic and makes plagarism a murky area (at least to my understanging). But I think that there is a boundary that we all know crosses the line between simply taking ideas and making them our own and plargarism. Do you agree?
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