“How do we acquire property without violence?”

It’s cool to see historic events tied into concepts that I’ve never really thought about before. Professor O’Malley opened up the class today with a question about the colonialism of the New World. How could the settlers claim land that was already owned by the Native Americans without using violence? Obviously this is hypothetical, considering the horrifying atrocities that the settlers committed, but Professor O’Malley actually brought up something said by John Locke. If a man mixes his labor with the land, than that land belongs to him. If you place water in a pitcher, than that water is yours. All of this was done under the misconception that the Native Americans did not labor on their own land, an indication of the racism of the settlers.

We were then lead into the topic of copyright. We were taught about patents, trademarks, and copyrights, but it was the copyrights that Professor O’Malley focused on, telling us about how copyright works. You have to constantly re-claim a copyright as the years go on to extend it. Your descendants do not automatically get it, and if you do not claim the copyright, then it will enter public domain, where it is owned by everyone and no one. It was an interesting topic, mainly because Professor O’Malley actually brought up his own battles with copyright in the songs that he shows us for class, since Youtube would hit his videos with copyright strikes after a week or two. We also had to read about the topic of copyrighting the Happy Birthday son, which I’ll admit made me chuckle and roll my eyes in equal measure, if only because

The most interesting topic of this class was the discussion on Corporations. Corporations are in many ways considered people in the eyes of the law, in that they can have property and use lawyers to represent them in legal disputes. It’s an interesting philosophical debate, since Corporations are larger than the people that founded them. The Corporations are immortal in a sense. They will continue to live on past the deaths of their founders, their workers, and even their audience, finding more and more people to fulfill the roles needed to keep it going. It’s almost humbling in a way, to think over the parts of the world that are much bigger than a single person.