In Class Sampling Remix

When I saw raj's sampling projects I noticed the communist flag's use (I assume) to associate copyright law with totalitarian governments. That inspired me to think that maybe instead it should be associated with capitalism because it's the pursuit of profit that prompts the overuse and overenforcement of copyright law. To express that sentiment (of copyright law exacerbating the contagion of avarice at the expense of our freedoms) I made the following picture-

With the position of the copyright sign and dollar signs replacing certain stars I tried to make the $'s look like a mushroom ring to express the epidemic aspect with copyright law at the center of it.

Sampling Experience

As we all know there's this sampling experience where we compile images into an argument about copyright law.

In case the message here wasn't clear, I was trying to depict a businessman yanking money out of the brain of a creator, and the ideas (represented by mickey mouse) being pulled out along with the money. I might go on to claim that the complacent smile worn by the creator was intentional, but it's just not true. The picture I originally had in my head that I wanted to create had a guy sitting down with a sketchpad in his lap, watching a mountain dew commercial while lawyers lobotomize an image of mickey mouse from his brain. I looked for a while but couldn't find images of television, a guy being lobotomized and lawyers all in the right configuration. At that point the lobotomy idea went as those pictures were the scarce link and I didn't think I had the skill to modify another picture to look like brain surgery. After I got some of the images I did want I realized that it was going to be difficult to show the TV and the guy watching it, and have those two elements facing each other. So the TV was no more, leaving me with the image above.
In a couple cases the sampling aspect enhanced my creativity; when I looked for businessmen and lawyers to do the brain-pulling I stumbled on one (the one you can see above that I ultimately used) with the businessman emphatically pulling on a chain of money, something that I think sells the direction of motion that I otherwise might not have thought of.
Overall, however, I thought of using sampling like that as a crutch. It's of course much easier to produce the sampled product above than it would have been to sketch out exactly what I was thinking, but in that case I would have been able to add all the elements as I wanted them.
Taking this idea that businesses are yanking creativity away from creators I tried for the second part, where we don't use copyrighted material...

That's a symbol from the US justice department balancing an image of a one dollar bill and an image of the thinker. Not very close, is it? My search for that section started with images of old statues, so that it would be in the public domain...I found few businessmen. In the end I ended up with the above eyesore, consoling myself with the knowledge that trying to connect the first and second images will provoke a lot of creativity.