For me, the hardest thing about this week was deciding what is considered to be creative and original versus what is considered to be uncreative writing. Similarly, we were trying to tackle the debate of if “uncreative writing” is considered to taking an influence from something and what is stealing and copyright. To look at specific examples of this, we looked at textual mashups through Markov chains. This tool that we were using in class allows us to be able to put in various texts, and it combines them into a shorter length (chosen by the user), to then get a completely new text that uses a random combination of text you selected. For example, Dr. Sample put in a bunch of random Taylor Swift lyrics, and it essentially created a whole new song with already existing Taylor Swift lyrics. Half of the time, the text generated make no sense as they are a random combination of phrases, but I still consider this to not be creative writing as the user is not producing any new writings.

Another specific example of this debate that we looked at was some music copyright cases. Some of my classmates and I looked into Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” versus Spirit’s “Taurus.” Spirit filed a copyright dispute claiming that Led Zeppelin stole the opening guitar riff from their song “Taurus.” Eventually, Led Zeppelin won the dispute and the court ruled that the riff was not stolen. Personally, I think the right decision was made as it was only one small portion of the song that was inspired by another small portion of Spirit’s song. I do think that when this happens in music though, the artist taking inspiration must contact the other artist and see how they feel about it. I can definitely see both sides and am sort of split on how I feel. This is definitely a debate that will continue to go on for a long time. The more music that is made, the more difficult it will be to come up with completely original melodies and rhythms.