The brown bag today was extremely interesting. I thought it was interesting to learn that a person doing a documentary would have to get writes for a song that just happened to be playing in the background. Hearing this made me really dislike our copyright laws. Although I understand why artist and producers would do this, I feel like this part of copyright has come to a bit of an extreme. Many directors can not predict a car passing by playing a song, yet they will get punished for having the music in their movie. I wish there was a way to work around this in our many copyright laws to protect these directors.
I agree, this example really caught my attention also. I never thought about things like that as a part of what goes into making movies. This would be especially terrible if the scene had to be shot at a very specific time of day and or season, and was just ruined by a 3 second drive by playing of Adele or some other hit artist. If they can’t afford to use the atrists song, so much of the actors, directors..etc time has gone by the wayside at the expense of a few seconds of popular music.
I felt like that is so excessive and insane. It isn’t the director’s fault that their one shot was impacted by a passerby. After the talk I have found myself more in favor for asking forgiveness than permission. The Ke$ha situation is still mind boggling to me because once again it was playing in the background and then it really needed to be in the documentary to capture that wonderful moment.
After today’s brownbag I also am really against today’s copyright laws. The fact that the creator of the documentary had to go through so much and waste so much time just trying to get Ke$ha’s song approved is a shame. It really should not be that hard to do something like that, and it discourages many artists from producing films and such.