I didnt get very far because I am not interested in that rap crap

Also see James Burke's "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed" about how technology and ideas change. Also, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote so much he spent a lot of time just mixing and sampling his own stuff, never mind everyone else's.

Lost me at "hip-hop."

The irony that copyright and patent law was copied, transformed and combined seemed lost on Ferguson.

It is a shame you guys stopped so early, rap and hip-hop was such a small part of the overall video. Of course ignorance and not opening your mind is probably part of your everyday life.

You could have least made it to the very end where you could have screamed "communism!" when it has nothing to do with communism.

I'll just click along, thanks.

Typical of many TED presentations. Heavy on leftist "social justice" theory. His idea here is banal and obvious. Of course our thoughts and ideas are derivative. Are "original" ideas (inventions, corporation names and logos, etc.) public property? And, are patent and trademark protections therefore unjust? That seems to be where he's going with this. Oh dear. His beliefs are, dare I say it?, unoriginal. He has lifted them from Karl Marx.

Cool.

Intellectual property and copyright is fine, but shouldn't there be some kind of time limit on it? Also the problem of litigation should be addressed somehow, but I wouldn't trust our current government not to screw it up even further. DMCA sucks.

With Robin Thicke now suing Marvin Gaye's parasitic brood to protect the latest appropriation, my mind went immediately to this video from when you first put it up here.

I can't help but laugh at the wonder of it all, these 'artists' and their kin making it all about money, while insisting for their type must be free from all shackles of societal standards and laws of indecency to protect their creative impulses.

Do not misunderstand - I don't support censorship by law , though I think we could get some creative taxation schemes to make the more odious creations more difficult to distribute widely. That and I fully support using progressive ideas prominently against their most ardent progressive supporters.

I just wish that those who protest that theirs is a life of art and creation would stop being so quick to protect their lucre when someone else may have taken license with their work, as surely they were once 'inspired' by someone else's.

One of the longest presentations that I've watched to completion. Better than a TED talk. The hip-hop portion is very short, if you gave up early, but it's very important.

I know how to get the 'I stopped at hip-hop because I am an ignorant moron' people to watch the rest of the video. In the video it talks about all the hits by LED ZEPPLIN that were stolen from someone else.

That was excellent, and important for anyone looking to create something new. Thank you.

FAck Czek:

The Xerox interface did allow you to resize windows without using a menu. It did have a stationary banner bar and it did have drag and drop. In fact it had a kind of triple redundant flexibility that Jobs merely simplified. Also, the Alto and the full development environment had a three button mouse, which you 'chorded' to get different combinations of popup menus. Most desktop metaphors (and probably all of them) never went nearly as far as Xerox. We were too brainy, complex and sophisticated for the masses. (But the CIA bought some)