School’s out Friday

Is John Green making sense to you here? Because he’s making a lot of sense to me.

Copyright laws are vexed, but so is creating work and sharing it, only to receive no compensation other than the satisfaction that comes from helping others. That works for awhile, but the reality of most people’s existence is that they need to earn money to feed themselves and their family.  What John Green is doing for his nerdfighters is truly admirable. We need more people with attitudes like this – people prepared to make the effort to seek out creators and share profits from work they have remixed or modified from an original source.

My son showed me the Sweet Brown video last night, and it got me thinking. Take a look here.

Sweet Brown has been the subject of Internet memes, and the catchy remix is now available for purchase on iTunes. Who is benefiting from remixing content like this? Sweet Brown, or the owners of the YouTube channels who are hosting advertisements while they rack up 16 million views poking fun at someone’s speech inflections? I note that she seems to have a website (if it is run by people associated with her) and you can buy tshirts and book her for appearances. I certainly hope she’s making some money out of this, because you can bet other people are making money from her.

One day, I will write something other than a School’s out Friday post. Cameron Paterson sent me this tweet tonight:

“You are too busy. Come back to us, please…Hope the new job is fun and challenging.”

My new job is fun and challenging. I’ve been learning a lot about managing a school network, and am indebted to the wonderful IT team at my school who have worked so hard these last few weeks rolling out a new printing solution for our school and getting everything ready for the start of the year. I’ve got a heck of a lot to do, but haven’t we all?

Right now, what I’m looking forward to is sleeping in tomorrow. I hope you get to enjoy the same luxury. Have a relaxing weekend – find some time for you. 🙂