Help me with my speech!

[Clawtrocity]

Basically it'd be awesome if you read over my speech and gave me any tips, ideas, or changes you think I should make. This is my first draft and I haven't even done the intro yet. Also it'd be nice if you watched the major source of my material "Everything is a remix" and make sure it doesn't sound too similar. I'm perfectly fine with it sounding like a major source, but I don't want to give my teacher any reason to think I plagiarized it. Spelling and grammar mistakes are okay to fix, but I'm mainly worried about the ideas rather than the proofreading aspect. It's due tomorrow morning so you can help out anytime between now and then.

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Copyright: The Creativity Road Block

Specific Purpose: To inform my audience what Copyright is and the problems it presents worldwide.

Central Idea: Copyrights are necessary for creators of all mediums and without them there would be chaos in the modern world, however the direction copyright laws are going we are no longer protecting the creators, but instead preventing new creators from prospering.

Introduction:

INPROGRESS

(Transition: First I am going to explain what exactly copyright means, its origins and the ideal purpose behind it.)

Body:

I. Copyright is defined as “a form of protection grounded in the U.S. Constitution and granted by law for original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Copyright covers both published and unpublished works.” (copyright.gov)
A. In a nutshell Copyright prevents people from stealing your work for a short period of time. Copyrights covered media and Patents covered inventions.
1. In the beginning if you had a blueprint of something then you could copyright it and you would get the rights to sell that product for a short span of time. Remember that because it'll come back shortly. You needed a blueprint of the item.
2. Nowadays you can also copyright ideas which are known as Intellectual property.
3. Copyrights protected the person who had to develop the product. If person A had to develop a product and spend money researching the product then person B could just copy it without those research and development costs and sell it for cheaper. Original products cannot compete with copies.
4. Both the copyright act and the patent act hoped to encourage new ideas rather than copy old ones.
5. If we were in China right now I would not have to attach a bibliography to this speech. I could even copy something directly from a website. Plagiarism is not a worldwide idea and most find it completely pointless to redo what someone has already done better than you. So we have to cite where we get our information, use our own words, and change it up.
B. So when we look at Thomas Edison usually the thought of the light bulb sparks up. The light bulb was copyrighted by Thomas Edison, but he didn't just invent the light bulb one day.
1. Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb. His first patent was on improvement in electric lamps.
2. He did however create the first commercially viable one after 6000 attempts to find the correct filament.
3. He took existing work and compiled on to it.
4. You can't just create something out of nothing, creativity isn't magic.
C. There are three basic elements of creativity and they are to Copy, Transform, and combine.
1. Hunter S. Thompson copied The Great Gatsby just to get a feel of writing a great novel.
2. Thomas Edison transformed the existing light bulb to create one that was cheaper and easier to make.
3. Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press by combining existing parts that had been around for centuries.

(Transition: So we understand how things are invented and why copyrights are in place, but what has changed today?)

II. Copyrights today are formed on the same principle they were over a hundred years ago, but the major difference today is that the majority of copyrights are filed for Intellectual properties or ideas. These ideas are vague and can easily be misinterpreted by the wrong person and that's when bad things happen.
A. In order for me to describe the way ideas are formulated I have to first describe the way we were all formulated. The genes in our bodies can be traced back to over 3 and a half billion years ago to a single organism called LUCA or Last Universal Common Ancestor.
1. Over time LUCA copied over and over duplicating itself. Eventually it copied with mistakes that ended up creating every one of the billions of spieces on earth.
2. Some of the species had sexual organs which they used to combine elements of two species to make a new one.
3. Evolution is based around copying, transforming, and combining.
B. Culture also evolves like this, but instead of duplicating genes it duplicates memes which are ideas, behaviors, and skills.
1. Memes just like genes are copied, transformed, and combined.
2. This is called Social Evolution. New ideas evolve from old ones.
C. This is the problem that the legal system faces when they have to deal with ideas.
1. In legal terms ideas are lots of space with distinct boundaries much like a storage facility.
2. In reality ideas are overlapping.
D. So today the problem with copyright and patent laws is that they were established under the guise that eventually someone's copyrighted work or patented item would enter the public domain and would be free to use for everyone.
1. The end goal of having a rich public domain to build upon old ideas without legal worry.
2. The reason this doesn't exist today is because of a human psychological trait called "Loss aversion".
3. Loss aversion is when you hate losing what you have. We place higher value on losses than gains.
4. Disney for instance used the public domain for their early movies, but when it came time to give up copyright on their early original work they filed to extend the copyright term. They were fine using the public domain, but they did not want anyone using their work in the public domain.
5. Steve Jobs once said "Good artists copy, great artists steal". He then went on to say that he was willing to go thermonuclear war on Android for stealing the idea from him.
E. Remember when I said that in order to get a patent you needed a blueprint? Flash forward to today's laws and instead of patents we have software patents.
1. Software patents are nothing more than vague ideas that would describe something if it was even real.
a. Information Manufacturing Machine which copies anything computer like.
b. Even Material Object which covers almost everything.
2. Because of Software patents loose descriptions when they first started popping up there were entire companies that devoted their time to filing copyrights for loosely defined terms.
a. Patent Trolls are companies or individuals that claimed software patents and go through the court system to make money. Most recently a patent troll company decided to sue over half the video game industry for it's patent on "Virtual worlds". Basically any video game that took place in a 3D world was being sued. There is no information whether the companies have settled out yet, but prior to this most recent matter they have had other companies settle out.
b. Sample Trolls are known for going to court over sampling done from music. If a song samples another song they will be sued for it and will usually settle out. That's the only way these companies make money because they don't actually produce anything.

Conclusion:
So what does all this mean? It means that the original idea of the Copyright act of 1790 to encourage learning was for the common good. We've stepped away from the learning and moved toward the squabbling of money and lawsuits. The common good is a meme that needs to spread again. Some people may say that without copyrights then inventors wouldn't invent and ideas wouldn't prosper, but I'll leave you with this. What would happen if Thomas Edison didn't invent the commercially available light bulb or Henry ford didn't invent the automobile? Would we not be as technologically advance as we are today? In history we've learned that when someone thinks of something there usually happens to be a breakthrough across the world almost simultaneously. Issac Newton and Godfrey Leibniz both invented calculus around the same year. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed the patent for the telephone on the same day. This phenomenon is called Multiple Discovery and it's when new ideas are spawned at different places from different people. No idea is original, in fact this speech that your listening to right now is nothing new. I merely took the ideas of others and compiled them into a format that is easily transcribed in under 7 minutes. Sometimes innovations are just inevitable and if more people realized that copyrights were nothing more than a race to see who could finish first then I believe there would be less struggle over the ideas themselves. Henry Ford once said "To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps in mankind is the worst sort of nonsense"

[Archangel]

wat

[Gingerape]

tl;dr

[Zane]

tl;dr

+1

[Archangel]

Oh yeah Thomas Edison was a failure

[Gingerape]

®©™
Bringing in evolution to make a point probably
isn't the best idea if your teacher is Christian.
Just sayin.

[Archangel]

Christians are gonna burn in hell.

[Tasogare_Akira]

It seems solid enough.

[Sinclair]

I like this speech a lot. Although I do agree with Ginger, if your teacher/professor is a devout Christian/Catholic/Whatever religion that does not believe evolution then I would be careful about that. Other than that it looks solid.

(I also noticed you probably copied and pasted directly from Microsoft Word due to lack of spaces in between I - a,b,c. II - a,b,c, etc. :P )

But good job, it's very informative and entertaining. Here's to an A+ for you.

[Admiral]

You're asking this forum to help you with something that requires a brain to do?

LOL