Similar to last week, the concept I struggled the most with was deciding what is original and what is not. For example, the iconic poster of Barack Obama that went viral during his first campaign. Shepard Fairey created a poster of Obama during his first campaign that read, “HOPE,” across the bottom of it. This poster was a photo of Obama with a ton of different shades of red, white, and blue making up the shading of his face and the background. After this poster came out, it was established that this photo in this poster was based on a photo taken by an AP freelance photographer, Mannie Garcia. Garcia received no credit whatsoever for this poster that went extremely viral during Obama’s campaign. This then brought up a huge debate about whether or not Garcia should have received some form of credit and been able to reap some benefits from the photo she had taken. Personally, I think she should receive a great deal of credit. Majority of my classmates in class agreed with my thought process on the whole deal. One of my classmates brought up a great point that sort of put the nail in the coffin for me in believing that Garcia should receive almost all the credit. My classmate pointed out that in the original photo, all of the shading is the same, just in black and white. This made us realize that it almost looked as if a filter was put over the original photo and that was it. To me, this made it seem like Garcia practically did all the work in designing that poster, but gained nothing from it.

Another concept that I sort of struggled with was deciphering what was a digital commons and what was not. At first, I thought that just any open, digital forum was a considered to be a digital commons, but this is not the case. For example, I thought sites such as eBay and Etsy were forms of a digital commons, but they are not. I was informed that was are more so just considered digital marketplaces. They do not fit the free and openness categories of a digital commons as people are often competing again one another to either buy or sell particular items. Oftentimes in digital commons, users help each other out and support one another with even asking.