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.

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?