Critical Essay: Stage 2

Very Rough Draft (Still needs conclusion)

Generally, using someone else’s work is considered to be stealing, but, is there a time when reusing someone else’s work is actually better than making your own work? From a legal standpoint, reusing anyone else’s work for any purpose is considered illegal. Still, there are times when taking someone else’s work and modifying it is better than trying to make your own work from scratch. There are two different situations where remixing someone else’s work is a better use of creative energy rather than starting over from scratch and one where remixing someone else’s work would be bad. The situations where remixing someone else’s work is better are when you plan to remake the product just for your own personal use and when you plan to make enough changes to the product so that it does not resemble the old product, and the situation where remixing is bad is when you change the product only a little and then you market the product as your own.

The first situation where using someone else’s work as a starting point is better is when you plan on modifying the product for your own use and no one else’s. This is especially prevalent in the field of computer software. If you don’t plan on marketing the product, why should you be forbidden from modifying the product you bought to fit your own needs? Modifying computer software in this situation would not hurt the sales of the product and it would make the customer that bought it much happier.

The second situation is when you plan on changing the product so much that it doesn’t resemble the original product at all. This situation is more questionable than the first situation. There is only a thin line separating this situation from the third situation. For this second situation to be alright, the product needs to be changed enough that there is no resemblance to the original product. This should be allowed because if you know that someone can make your product better and market it, you will be more inclined to make the best product that you possibly can. The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer is an example of this modifying a work and claiming it is your own. Chaucer saw how he could improve The Decameron and so he took this original work and made it better while changing it enough that it was his own work and marketed it as his work. This work was so much better that we still study it today. If there had been rules against this, we would not have this great work to study.

The third situation is the one reason why being able to change someone else’s work and calling it your own is bad. There will be some instances where someone will only change the original work a small amount and try to market it as their own work. This would mean that people could make money off of other peoples workTo make improving someone else’s work legal, there would have to be rules on what would be considered enough improvement to make someone else’s work be considered yours. Chaucer’s remaking of The Decameron could be debated to be in this situation. Even though Chaucer’s story has its differences from the original work, the two stories are still very similar.

Insert Conclusion Here