I found the brownbag on Tuesday to be very entertaining as I was very interested in the discussion. I was extremely shocked to learn that the play Arabian Nights was allowed so many changes by the director. It even seemed to shock the speaker herself that so many changes were allowed without much effort in trying to contact the author. I think it is funny how some plays are allowed to be changed from the original work while others can not be altered the slightest bit. I had gone into the brownbag thinking that all plays exhibited the same copyright laws and could not be altered at all, and came out with this notion completely shattered. After learning this, I decided to do a little more research on the copyright laws of plays to learn more about them. I stumbled upon this site which helps out students who want to put on school performances but do not know the legal way to go about it. It mentions that amateur rights to perform a play may be revoked if there are too many productions of the same play or musical in a certain region within a certain year. This  really surprised me because I thought that this is something that author’s would want–shouldn’t they be happy that their play is being performed so frequently?

Many lawsuits I find on the internet are normally exaggerated and morally unjustified. This lawsuit regarding Apple and China makes me rethink my belief to create more lenient laws.  The lawsuit can be summarized with a few quotations:

“A Chinese court has fined Apple Inc 1 million yuan ($160,400) for hosting third-party applications on its App Store that were selling pirated electronic books, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.”

“We are disappointed at the judgment. Some of our best-selling authors only got 7,000 yuan. The judgment is a signal of encouraging piracy,” Bei Zhicheng, a spokesman for the group, told Reuters.

“China has the world’s largest Internet and mobile market by number of users, but piracy costs software companies billions of dollars each year.”

When I read “billions of dollars each year” I began to rethink copyright laws.  From what I have learned in this class so far, I’ve thought that copyright laws should become more lenient; however, now i realize its not a problem of leniency but the fact that America is in need of an overall renovation of copyright law.  technological advances have moved too quickly for law-makers and therefore many copyright laws are unjustified whether being too strict or too lenient.  With regards to this specific case I dont know how I feel about China losing money.  I feel bad for the individual authors but to be honest our economies are basically fighting for superiority so a little less GDP for China may not be so bad.

Alicia Keys was accused of copyright infringement on her single “Girl on Fire.” “Songwriter Earl Shuman says Keys’ track sounds too similar to his 1962 composition “Hey there Lonlely Girl”

“Though Friedman noted, “Keys only uses two seconds of the original,” Shuman’s complaint says the statements “concerning ‘two seconds’ of use are not accurate” yet “in their essence, apt.”

Shuman thinks Alicia copied more than two seconds of the original and i just listened to both songs and cannot even find a single second that sounds similar.  I challenge someone to find any similarities in the song that one could use for copyright evidence because these two songs are completely different in lyrics and melody.

The dance performance I saw on Wednesday was like no dance performance I have ever seen before in that it was uniquely creative and incorporated a great deal of hidden meanings within the dance. The dance certainly did not follow the typical norms for dance performances, or at least that was my opinion while watching it. I found a short article discussing the dance, and it brings up many different aspects of the dance that had been previously unknown to me. Apparently, when “The Rite of Spring” debuted in 1913 it nearly caused a riot in Paris due to the sexual nature of the performance. This does not really shock me, since the play does incorporate sexuality quite blatantly as a major theme. I wonder if the play has been altered since then to tone down its sexual nature, or copyright laws have prevented this from happening and society has simply become more open?

The brownbag on Tuesday was extremely enlightening – I didn’t know that most plays had to be performed exactly to a T, note for note. My mom had been telling me about a boy who was performing in his high school drama club, and dropped the “f” bomb because it was written in the script. The boy was suspended from school, and is pending charges; he was also supposed to be valedictorian, but that was revoked with his suspension. The director and the boy came under a lot of fire for that comment, but if each play is supposed to be performed exactly as written, then it is interesting because had he not dropped the F bomb, then it would have been an issue of copyright infringement. Either way, the director and student would have been screwed. Perhaps they should have picked a less provocative play.

Like Brian, I wasn’t able to attend the game but I did watch it on TV, to support my friends and classmates that are on the team. I thought it was really interesting that the game itself “belongs” to CBS sports – that CBS was the only one who would play it, and as a result most of campus couldn’t watch the game because it wasn’t available online or on regular cable. I thought that was kind of unfair, especially the fact that they weren’t streaming it online. That also opens up some interesting questions about copyright, and who “”owns” the game. Does that mean that if a parent in the crowd, recording the game, could be sued for copyright infringement if they post it on YouTube? How could you copyright something physical that occurs over a period of time?

The lecture by Geraldine Brooks was an amazingly funny lecture, something I definitely didn’t expect. She opened my eyes to the world of historical fiction, and just how difficult, yet engaging, writing such a novel is. By explaining the extensive amount of research she puts into each person before writing the novel, she really “gets”to know someone – it must be strange as well to get to know somebody so well, even though they are deceased. Again, putting yourself in that person’s shoes must be even more strange, even though you now know them in a more intimate way than most people do. Trying to think in a way that a real-life person would have is such a daunting, challenging, yet exciting task – her lecture opened my eyes to just how exciting writing historical fiction must be.

For the Lafayette vs. Bucknell Patriot League final for basketball I wasn’t able to go to Bucknell but I did however find a way to watch it.  I held a floor program because I sensed a numerous amount of students would like to watch the game but couldn’t travel the three hours to see it in person.  This experience of watching it on TV sparked a question about copyright.  As the television ads were shown it struck me that they had been made with the intention of being entertaining.  This led me to ask the question: what are the copyright laws for advertisements if any?

I researched this question at this website Link to find some answers.  It turns out that advertisements have the same legal boundaries as any other media does in terms of copyright.  Although I understand that the writer of the advertisement doesn’t want his work to be used by another company (even if it’s not put on television) I find it puzzling why companies would restrict consumers from spreading their commercials. The entire point of an advertisement is to grab the attention of many consumers about the companies’ product so they can sell more.  It doesn’t make sense to me that the companies would try and cap that spreading of it with copyright laws.

It seems to me that the copyright laws of advertisements should be revised so that other companies can’t steal ideas of ads as their own while still allowing consumers to share it with no limits.  It is essentially free advertising for consumers to spread a funny or entertaining commercial to their friends, which in turn would create more awareness of the product being advertised.  Companies need to take a look at the copyright laws to help themselves.

The lecture by Geraldine Brooks was one of the best lectures I have ever seen. She was an amazing speaker who had so many great and funny stories to tell. However I found the topics she wrote about the most interesting part of her lecture. I went in not knowing anything about her. Honestly, I did not even know she was an author. However she is an author and not only just an author, but a historical fiction author. I did not even know historical fiction was possible. How do you combine a our very factual history together with fiction which means non factual? Mrs. Brooks answered this question for me with her writing style. She writes about real people in history but she fills in the blanks and the questions about them with fiction. However, her fiction is not just whatever she wants to put it she researches every little detail possible before starting to write. Then, she “connects” with the person she is trying to write about. I was amazed by her ability to connect two huge ways of writing with such style. After her lecture, I decided I was going to read one of her books over Spring Break.