Mashups

Mashups are the new applications of images and internet ideas from one site that are put together for a new application. The mashup I found that I will use is from a site called www.2itch.com. It is a mashup of google maps with information about restaurants, gas stations, and a lot of other categories of places. It was on the Mashup awards site. That mashup is useful because it improves the usefulness of the information from the different images it puts together. I have a trip to Solano County Prison library planned for May 7 for a librarian interview. I will be using that mashup to plan my trip there and I will be planning my stops and seeing where the gas stations are and where I can stop to eat while there. That mashup is much better than spending $300 on a Garmin GPS device that would be a distraction while I am driving. I am in Van Nuys and it would be about a 7-hour drive to get to the interview. I asked if it can be a phone interview but they denied my request. I would relocate if offered the job. Usually mashups just make funny pictures. Most mashups are used to make funny pictures, like Alfred Newman merged with George Bush or pictures of political candidates in movie posters. Mashups allow unoriginal artists to make instant pictures that are not creative. They also allow people to view many images at once or create instant visual aids that hve familiar images. I liked the www.2itch.com mashup because it improves the imported information it uses, making it into a multitool, or an online swiss army knife. When done correctly, a mashup can serve as a swiss army knife for the web user. I only hope a mashup is not a form of plagarism from the original users. What intellectual property issues arise out of being able to import images or web data? How much does the image need to be altered before it is no longer plagarism? I have heard theat there is incremental plagarism, which is a form of academic dishonesty where every sentence was stolen from a different source. The first paragraph might have been copied from the Encyclopedia Britannica, the next paragraph might have been copied from a wiki article, and the index might have been copied from an old Vladivostok telephone directory. What keeps a mashup from being a form of incremental plagarism?