Just like other students have been able to relate to the way academia treats copying, I can also relate to this. John talks a bit about Turnitin, I personally hate this internet service. In high school whenever we had to turn in an essay or some other type of written work we had to do it through Turnitin. Turnitin is an internet based service that will scan your document,(and archive it) and check for plagiarism. Because of this whenever I had to use this program to turn in assignments I was always very fearful of getting into trouble even though I would not do anything wrong. It made me feel like a criminal, and this is the environment that students have to learn in.
This environment is still around students when they enter college. As a student here at UIC I have seen how the university tries to use fear to deter cheaters. The policy in the department of computer science is that if you are caught cheating on an exam, on homework, or on a project, then you will fail the class and be expelled from the university. This policy adds a lot of pressure to students when students should be collaborating and learning from each other.
Something else that John Ippolito talked about was the creative commons license. As opposed to the regular copyright license, this license allows others to use content in a creative way with some restrictions. This is a great way to remix other works and create new works that can then be remixed as well. While this is great, there is still a lot of content that has a copyright. This is a problem because there will be times that artist will create wonderful pieces of work, only to be taken away because if the copyright. This is especially true when someone will create a music video of a particular song that is a lot better than the original, but this video will get taken down. This happens because sites like Youtube have automated video take-downs. If a video matches some criteria, the video might be taken down. I personally had this experience when I made a video for a class. The video featured part of a song, just the instrumental. The video was taken down within a day.
There are some gray areas when dealing with copyright laws. What I think is interesting is that with the rise of 3D printers these laws will only get muddier. Already there has been cases of people getting into trouble for their creations. One such incident is when Fernando Sosa began selling sculptures that he made using his 3D printer, one suck sculpture was a Game of Thrones phone dock. Soon he received a cease and desist letter from HBO telling him to stop reproducing and selling the dock. This incident is interesting because it changes the way we think about copyright infringement and begs the question, at what point does a creation infringe on copyrights.