I found an interesting article online about the singer of Gangnam Style and his approach towards dealing with copyright. Apparently, “Psy’s relaxed attitude towards people infringing on his copyright helped turn Gangnam Style into one of the most successful cultural phenomena in recent years, and that includes becoming the most-viewed video on YouTube ever”. I think it’s interesting how his approach to copyright is so different from that of other artists. I also found it interesting how Psy makes a profit from his songs. He uses this relaxed attitude towards copyright infringement to gain the public’s attention, and then uses this attention as a direct pathway towards commercial production. This seems to be the norm in Korea as “it is television commercials that are the big money spinner for the most successful of North Korea’s K-pop stars”. I wonder why American singers seem to take such a different approach to making money and adhere so strictly to the copyright law.

Copyright and live performances seem to work simply enough. Pay to attend, no recording, enjoy the performance. What makes it different from things like videos and albums is that that the specific event only happens once. And even if the performance, be it a concert, a talk, or anything else, is recorded, and videos sold, what doesn’t get packaged together is the experience. The experience of being with others in the same room as the performer, to watch them do their thing live. In that regard for copyright, a live performance would most likely be handled as a video would be. After all, a recorded video is no longer a live performance.

In terms of making copies, there is really is only one device that can truly make a copy of the event: the human brain. It records the performance and stores it in memory, allowing someone to retell, quote, or even act out the event. Naturally, since the performance is being done to become a memorable experience, aside from it being impossible to regulate, they would not want that copy to be prevented.

Here are two Youtube clips of Maroon 5’s hit song, Daylight. This clip is from their performance live on The Ellen Show whereas this clip is Maroon 5’s Daylight Project video. This video was the closest thing I could find to an official music video.

The sound of the band in the live performance sounds much different than recorded version. The live performance is harder to listen to because they don’t sound very good, although I love the song when it was recorded. For musicians, I think videeotaping is not allowed to help protect their reputation and music. The recording studios make the quality much better, which drives people to want to see them in person. If more and more live performances were broadcast online legally, I think it would affect live performance sales because people will know how bad singers and bands can be in person.

In terms of legally, not being able to videotape speeches and performances, U.S. v. Martignon was an important case. An except from the Harvard Law Review summarizes the decision:

Recently, in United States v. Martignon, 4 the Second Circuit considered whether Congress could enact under the Commerce Clause a criminal anti-bootlegging statute that was concededly inconsistent with the Copyright Clause’s limited duration requirement. The court held thatthe statute was not subject to Copyright Clause scrutiny because it did not allocate property rights in expression.

The Fordham Law Review noted, “If these
decisions are upheld and widely followed, not only will
bootlegging laws be outside the scope of Congress’ lawmaking
authority, but the United States also will be incapable of enforcing
a uniform policy that would comply with article 14 of the TRIPs
agreement—an accord sponsored and signed into law by the
President harmonizing American intellectual property law with the
laws of 110 other signatory nations.”

The discussion in class yesterday made me think about what I read. Normally, when asked what I read, I think in the direction of literature, and how most of the time the manga I read isn’t considered as such. But being told that the things we come across on facebook and the internet count as “reading” I realize just how much reading I do. When I was younger, I loved spending time looking for books in the library and reading a lot of books.  I felt like I read a lot less, and that Striphas’s book pointed out my own decline in reading. But with all the internet surfing and searching I do, I probably read more than I ever did.

I found this interesting article about the impact of e-books on the environment, and the impact of printed books on the environment. It was extremely interesting to see that although we love the printed book, e-books are much more environmentally friendly than the book. Although I love printed books, sometimes we have to make sacrifices about what we like in order to save what we need – the earth, for example.

My town used to be a farming town that quickly overdeveloped into a crowded subarb- as a result, there is no downtown in my town and a lot of the charm that a traditional downtown has in most towns was lost in Piscataway. When everyone was talking about quaint bookstores in class yesterday, I was amazed to hear about the personality of the different bookstores in their towns. In my town, we had a Waldenbooks that closed down a few years ago, and since then there has been no replacement bookstore, so I’ve been forced to go to Barnes and Nobles to buy my books. I’ve never seen how charming a little bookstore could be, but I wish I could have experienced that little charm that small-town bookstores seem to hold. It definitely made me realize the impact of not just book monopolies, but also e-books – barnes and nobles have their nook, but small town bookstores don’t have any equivalent of a bookstore. They’re being left behind.

In my high school, when I was a freshman, everyone was required to buy a tablet PC – basically, a laptop who’s screen could swivel and lie flat on top of the keyboard to act as a notebook, and the computer came with a little stylus that acted as a pen on the screen of the computer. It was a really neat idea, and a lot of students really liked it, but I found it much more distracting than helpful. Everyone would always be staring at their screen doing something else (googling, reading news articles, etc since Facebook was blocked) instead of actively participating in class discussions. While the notebook setting was a great idea, most people abused the system so that they wouldn’t have to pay attention in class. Although this technology was great, and we didn’t have to carry around a ton of notebooks and textbooks all the time, we lost a lot of concentration along the way. It seems that with the rise of technology, everyone’s attention span is getting shorter and shorter – we’re so used to being entertained all the time, that when we have to go through something that’s a little boring, we immediately stop paying attention because it isn’t as engaging as what we’re used to.

The class discussion and talking about the reading yesterday made me think about why people read books.  No matter how many attempts the eBook industry makes to create a similar experiences to books (i.e. notes, page flipping, etc.) it will simply never be the same.  This is why I believe there has been a slow progression in the use of ebooks as The Late Age of Print described.  Now people are starting to realize it is a different experience and are accepting it for what it is, which is why they are becoming popular.

Password sharing is becoming more and more common on sites such as HBO Go, Netflix, and Hulu. Apparently, we are not the only people who have taken notice of this trend. A New York Times article titled, “No TV? No Subscription? No Problem” focused on the same topic. According to the author, “to the collective relief of nearly everyone I know, the companies with whom I spoke seemed to have little to no interest in curbing our sharing behavior — in part because they can’t.” The companies cannot track how many people are free-riding. They believe the current business model still generates the most profit.

One sentence in particular stuck out to me the most in this article: “[M]any more new paths are likely if the entertainment companies’ business models evolve in tandem with users’ habits.”Societal trends and advancements in technology are both changing how people use entertainment. Although e-Books and television are different, both industries’ business models and methods of delivery might be shifting as people change their user habits.

The title of the article, “Teacher Knows if You’ve Done Your E-Reading” might send a chill down some students spines. It describes a new advancement in technology that might be a student’s worst nightmare or the tool that could fix his study habits pre-eminently. The technology? Data tracking that allows professors to get a glimpse of if and how much students are reading their e-Textbooks.

College is a time for students to become independent and take more responsibility for their actions. This technology creates another figure watching over them. Furthermore, students might take notes on paper, which would negatively affect their rating. Others could can find ways to game the system. At the same time, the data tracking could help professors understand why students are not understanding material. Like many technologies, data tracking of e-reading has benefits and detriments depending on how it is used by students and professors alike.