Category Archives: Uncategorized

Glee and Copyright

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During my research of films and music copyright, I stumbled on this essay written by a Yale Law School student.  Interestingly enough, the essay appears on a blog similar to ours, with comments from the author’s peers at the bottom of the webpage.  The author, Christina Mulligan, discusses how copyright is ignored in the popular show, Glee.  The characters often create mash-ups of preexisting songs, perform covers, and even make direct copies of music videos.  The show ignores the issue of copyright completely while, in reality, copyright lawsuits occur all the time.  According to Mulligan, the students of Glee would be on the losing side of a copyright lawsuit for their work.  Mulligan asserts that students who actually do this are doing so “to learn about themselves, to become better musicians, to build relationships with friends, and to pay homage to the artists who came before them” (Mulligan).

 

What do you think?  Should excuses be made for students in copyright law?  Do these excuses already exist?

Class Discussion

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Today’s class discussion was really interesting. It made me look more deeply into the issue of multiple ways to cite. I came across this funny article discussing how to simplify the many different ways into one universal system which the author calls the “author-year” system. Honestly, I agree with the author of this article. All we really need is the author, the year, and the type of source it is. All of these different ways to cite have just got way out of control.

Article

Changes Coming?

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It seems like change could happen in the future for copyright law. It is refreshing to see that the head of the Copyright Office acknowledges the fact that the system has some issues. I am not surprised that this is going to take a great deal of time to fix things but you cannot expect such an overhaul to happen over night. I also didn’t realize how many stakeholders this could potentially affect.

Brown Bag 2

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The brown bag today was incredibly interesting and insightful. I
never thought about what was on the TV when filming or what song could be heard
in the background. There are so many elements that I feel we as viewers take for
granted. The clip we saw about the Texas Two Step and getting permission to show
that was also interesting. It was a group of people dancing but contacting the
original creator was necessary in order to get permission and show the clip.

Sharing Music

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As I mentioned earlier in the week I am the president of the radio station
on campus. I have taken a lot of music from CD’s that I have found and
downloaded it to my iTunes. I know of at least 30 other people that have done this even though it is technically illegal. I know that the number of people taking the work impacts whether or not it is a problem. I have thought about how much money has been taken from the artist by all of us downloading the entire album from sharing the CD. Assuming 50 people have downloaded the CD over the years and saying the album costs $7.99 on iTunes that is $399.50 that the artist and associates did not see. At that point the music isn’t just being used for personal use but there is nobody to enforce it. I do feel kind of bad for what I have done but it isn’t going to stop me because there is basically no way of getting accused of stealing music.

Illegal?

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In my high school sex ed class, we had an assignment in which we had to make an advertisement (on paper) for condom use. Of course this assignment allowed for a ton of creativity. What I chose to do, however, was use the Nike slogan, with a bit of a twist. So, my advertisement read: “Just Do It…but with a condom.” In addition to that I had drawn the Nike swoosh and some sports equipments and condoms. Looking back at this now it seems as if I could have been engaging in copyright infringement, as I “stole” Nike’s slogan. However, because this was for educational purposes does that make my actions okay? And if this wasn’t okay, why did my teacher not inform me of this?

Free Music

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Today in the brown bag, we learned that there are different websites that have free music available for producers and directors to use in their videos. I found this extremely interesting, so I decided to look into one of these websites. When searching the internet, I found the Free Music Archive. The Free Music Archive is a portal for producers to find free music for their videos. I looked around the website a little bit and explored some of the music. A lot of the music on the Free Music Archive was really strange, but there were some really great songs. I found this website to be a great idea for both the producers looking for music and the artist looking to get their music out there. It is interesting how artist just place their work out there in hopes of having someone use it. It is also interesting to think that a producer has the potential to make one of these artist famous by using their work. I think this is a great example of how copyright laws can be worked around and be used to an artist advantage.

 Website

 

Film Brown Bag part 2

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In regard to the part of the documentary we got to see about David, it was very heartfelt, humbling, and touching to say the least. Your heart really went out to David in the scene in which it showed him dancing to Ke$ha’s song “We R Who We R.” There he was just a little ten year old boy having fun, as if everything was okay, despite his looming death. It was truly inspiring. But the fact that Ke$ha and her “crew” needed to profit off of this scene of the documentary almost makes me sick. The fact that this scene was almost deleted from the documentary to avoid charges, is terrible, as it definitely is crucial in showing David’s character and strength. There should be some exceptions to copyright, and in my opinion, this definitely should be one of them.

This scene about David reminded me a lot of Katy Perry’s music video for her song “Firework.” It is interesting how one artist can seemingly be so sensitive to the world problems that kids suffer from, while another artist can take away (maybe by accident) so much from that world.

Film Brownbag part 1

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I never really thought about all of the small technicalities in putting together a film. All I ever thought of was the script and the actors memorizing the lines correctly. But when professor Sikand mentioned the example of shooting an important scene and it “getting ruined” by a car driving by playing an Adele song, I realized just how easily things could get complicated. The scene that the filmmakers were shooting now probably costs them double the amount of money, just from the brief background of a popular song. And because of this large amount of money being owed to Adele and her “crew,” a lot of smaller film makers will shy away from using their crucial footage, just because they can’t afford to pay for the few seconds of Adele in the backgroud. It is sad that a lot of important films are being thrown by the way side because of these types of monetary problems. This example reminds me of a quote from the epilogue of Vaidhyanathan’s book, Copyrights & Copywrongs, “Isn’t copyright supposed to encourage art?…Instead, more and more, excessive and almost perpetual copyright protection seems to be squelching beauty, impeding exposure, stifling creativity” ( Vaidhyanathan 185).

Brown Bag

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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.