In my collaborative essay for our second portfolio, my partner and I talk a lot about fair use.  On the copyright website, to be defined as fair use, the following needs to be considered :

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

In my collaborative essay we looked at Pinterest as a case study.  A Pinterest user myself, I found it hard to find Pinterest as a form of copyright infringement.  I think that Pinterest falls under fair use because when something is pinned or re-pinned, it means something different to each user pinning it.  I also find that Pinterest helps increase the market for a work and helps to better expose original creators. What do you think?

As of yesterday the United States patten system has switched from the old “first to invent” patent system to a more modern “first to file” system. This article gives concise and easy to understand explanation of what this means for the patent system. It is interesting that until yesterday, the US was one of the only countries operating under the old system. How do you think, if at all, this will effect inventors and their inventions?

With the implementation of the new  “6 Strike” system, it seems that the war on piracy is the new war on drugs. But is that really an effective way to fight piracy? A recent article has likened these attempts to curb piracy to the war on drugs. However, history has shown us that “prohibition” has never worked. When alcohol was made illegal from 1920-1933, the black market and organized crime exploded, it was shown that when people believe they have a right to something; nothing anyone can say or do will stop them. Even more recently, with the War on Drugs, we can see that prohibition simply does not work and now the same tactic is being used on modern copyright infringement.

So why does this tactic continually resurface?

The brown bag on Tuesday was really cool after watching Arabian Nights. I thought that it was interesting to talk to the person who directed and choreographed the performance. I felt like I was in the presence of a celebrity. She was the one who made all of the final decisions about the musical; what dances should be done, who was to make the music, what parts to cut out, who would play what character, etc… I was impressed that she was able to see the show across the pond in Great Britain before she played it here. She was also able to see how to make it more family friendly, something she might not have been able to do if she didn’t get inspiration from the showing in Britain.

I also thought it was interesting how the playwright allowed so much flexibility in the production of their play. I think this is because the playwright is a professor and has probably put on plays at their college/university also. They have experienced the difficulty of putting on a play with a limited amount of volunteers and sticking to the script exactly. The playwright is non-pompous and is okay with other people performing their work, with whatever spin on it is needed to make the production as great as it could be.

A basketball game has branding everywhere. Since Bucknell was the home team, there was orange and blue splashed along the arena.  Bucknell had the bison as its mascot and Lafayette is the Leopard. I noticed that Lafayette’s logo is copyrighted. I am pretty sure that means that permission needs to be given before the logo is used in anything. It was printed in a lot of different places and I wonder if all of them went through the same steps to legally use the logo, or if they just printed them assuming that it would be ok.  When anyone prints the Lafayette logo, could they be sued for doing so? Even if I go to the school, do I still have to ask permission to use the logo?

I found an interesting article from the New York Times that discusses how “some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content”. This is a perfectly understandable concern, and is extremely similar to what we actually discussed in class last week regarding the multiple-person guitar video, which many could argue takes viewers away from the original version of the song. I wonder if this sort of “scraping” really takes a significant amount of viewers away from original content, or if it actually makes viewers more likely to view the original content, enticing them towards it?

Is internet piracy stoppable? It seems as soon as one website closes, another one pops up. The “copyright alert system” also known as “six strikes” was debuted and activated by Verizon and Comcast.The new system is funded by a group known as the Center for Copyright Information (CCI), which is made up of five major American ISPs, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It’s been in the works for years and may provide a significant change to the copyright infringement policing regime in the United States.

This system is called “six strikes” because subscribers who are found to be illegally sharing content will be sent six electronic warnings,  and if they fail to comply, they could temporarily lose Web access or have their Internet speed slowed to a crawl for two to three days. Do you think that this will change the way people pirate media?

http://baylorlariat.com/2013/03/08/editorial-waging-war-against-internet-piracy-is-useless/

This article, the continuation and final part of the feature I had given before shows two different cases where recent cases highlight areas of copyright law that regard international copyright and distribution.

Primarily, the First Sale Doctrine seems to state that anything bought can be resold without any issue… as long as it originated in this country. This proves to create difficulty, as many things from overseas usually would have to be ordered online, if they can. Otherwise, such as the case of a convention, overseas goods could be obtained by dealers who work in buying the goods to resell. However the First Sale Doctrine would essentially declare this illegal.