As someone who quite often consumes media made by online content creators, most of the interactions that I had with copyright was as a sudden strike against someone for using copyrighted music for a few seconds too long, or simply offering a critique of a piece of media and having some angry creator seek retribution. This talk helped me to remember that copyright is not simply a tool for Disney to occasionally give some people a good slap (although this does happen) but also a real tool for the protection of intellectual property.

One interesting thing that was brought up by Inba Kehoe in the talk is that anything that I create is protected by copyright law. This is honestly something that I had never thought about, it can be important to sometimes receive a sharp tap on the head and be reminded of your own ability to exercise autonomy in one’s own intellectual rights. Another aspect of copyright that I did not give much thought to was how it can give reasons to exercise respect towards your colleagues.

I think that we should all remember that the works that we create have real protections associated with them, and that these protections do not just apply to the products of large corporations. We can control how our works are used and it is not outside of our power to decide how the products of our intellectual labour are used.