Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Picture Perfect (?)

Currently in the world of the CSCI1300 class, we begin to delve into images, and naturally accompanying such is photo editing software. Today we examine a picture that has been edited in order to create a more child-friendly picture.

This is a picture of Clement Hurd, who illustrated the child's book Goodnight Moon (thus the reason I chose this picture, as it was my favorite growing up). From the dust cover of the book itself, we can see that Hurd is awkwardly holding his right hand up to his chest in almost a "come here" motion. This is because before the photo was rendered he was holding a cigarette. The image was most likely changed to be more appealing to the parents who would buy this book for their children, as smoking is often considered a terrible habit. In the long run, I doubt this editing was harmful to anyone, but it could possibly help market the book better.

All the same I'd read it to my kids, cigarrete or not.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Copyright

I am pretty well-versed in the laws of copyright due to a previous multimedia course I was enrolled in, but there a few pointers that Mr. Hardin brought up that made me re-evaluate my thoughts on copyrights.

For starters, I did not think of the process that Disney and other companies could use in order to re-copyright a character. So even though the expiration for Disney's Mickey Mouse might be coming up within the next decade or so, as long as they keep making new shows and/or movies with him in it, it is still their property.

Another interesting topic that was brought up was how copyright allows creativity to flourish. Without copyright laws anyone could claim rights to any given work that was already produced. Granted some people might still do that if they're tricky enough and the other party is stupid enough, but copyrights nowadays at least let people feel secure that their work is safe.

And in support of copyright I now publish the blog... COPYRIGHTED'D'D


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CSCI1300 blog by Alex Holmes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.