anna's "the digital past" blog

I just received a speeding ticket in the mail today. Normally, someone gets pulled over by an actual cop for speeding. However, a sneaky little camera in downtown DC happened to spy my white mustang driving by (just a little bit too fast) and capture my error. Now, this little anecdote might seem irrelevant, but I swear there is kind of a point. Police officers (and apparently cameras) help monitor what we do right on the road. This is how we get caught doing something bad, right?

Could you imagine if the internet had police to catch us using other people’s work or pictures or music?

The very pictures at the top of my webpage are subject to copy right infringement. I would already have a ticket! But now think about all of the other people who were driving by me in downtown DC. I’m sure the camera failed to capture every person speeding by. (I mean, I don’t really know if it can take pictures of more than one car at one time…) It always comes down to luck. I was unlucky enough to be the one who got caught speeding. Could you imagine all of the people and WebPages out there that could possibly be in guilty of copy right infringement? It must be in the thousands.. if not millions. It would be a cop’s worst nightmare.

It’s so crazy to think that even the smallest saying or beat in a song can be a copy right infringement. I remember once an article on MSN was talking about how the song by Avril Levine was said to have the same beat as a song from many, many years ago. And I’m sure this happens all the time! After all, how many “original” beats and songs and pictures can people come up with? I honestly feel like it’s so hard to have a unique opinion or idea when people out there may have had it before you.

But anyway, the internet just makes it so much harder to monitor copy right infringement. Maybe if we had police officers patrolling the web, the problem may be more under control. Or maybe they’ll just invent some type of online camera search thing to do it for them. 🙂

My topic of the Marine Corps parade in Washington DC did not come up in the search box when I entered it onto Wikipedia. I did, however, learn that there is a town called Marine Parade in Singapore… I’m not exactly sure if that wiki was a credible source, though.

So, I decided to enter Marine Barracks in Washington DC instead. Precisely “Marine Barracks, Washington DC was exactly what I searched for. By searching this, I came up with a lot more valuable information related to my topic. (I guess entering the right search criteria really does make a difference!)

The information given on the page really does seem credible. Since I have a previous knowledge of the area and background, everything did add up well and correctly. After checking the history of the page, I found one change very interesting. There was a dialog taken out in July that was “said” between a commandant and an official in the British forces. I suppose it was taken out because no one would know exactly what was said during a conversation that happened over 200 years ago. It was a good call to be taken out.. but it does add some interest to the article.

Sadly, there was nothing in the “talk” section for my article. I suppose it might just not be something people really want to talk or comment on.

Finally, I looked at the notes, references, and external links at the bottoms of the page. All of the external links were to government official websites such as the Marine Corps official website. Those are definitely credible. The references, again, were similar to those. The notes also added information to clarify specific sections of the article. Another aspect that I found interesting was that in the “see also” section, a link came up for “reportedly haunted locations in Washington DC.” I never knew that the marine barracks is reportedly haunted!! Now I am kind of scared to ever go back…

All in all, I do believe that this webpage is very credible. The people who edited the information really did do it justice.