Tag Archives: my little pony

Moving beyond DRM

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Have you been counting? This is my third DRM post. I must love it. Or hate it. Either way, it’s damn easy to blog about.

I haven’t heard many jaw-dropping suggestions for adequate copyright control which both protects the copyright holders and respects the need of consumers and pirates alike. But this article has some sweet ideas. A big thing is convenience. People want options, and they want options in front of them. Understand that if given the choice, people would buy what they want. Putting up ads for new shows on hulu, or special deals on netflix would probably deter a lot of piracy. If I can buy my episodes of My Little Pony right after I watch Rugrats, I wouldn’t have to go on Youtube to watch them.

Parodies: Pony Fabulous

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Today, I saw a very well done parody video of one of Taylor Swift’s new songs. After watching, I thought of its implications in terms of copyright, and decided that this video indeed fell under fair use. The purpose of the work is purely entertainment. Since this entertainment is geared, I suspect, to an audience who generally dislikes Swift, the effect on the original song’s potential market is null. With two of the four factors of fair use checked off, I would like to bring a bit of my frenemy Goldstein into this discussion. As noted from his discussion of software protection under copyright, copyright does not protect the method or process of a text, only its expression (191). The creator of this video certainly does not replicate Swift’s expression of her song, since he changes the lyrics entirely and score slightly; his message/theme is entirely different from hers. The sound itself can be thought of as the process: copying that is perfectly legal.

Only a few minutes after thinking of this blog post, I remembered another parody video of a different nature. This video was made by a TV station in order to promote its own show. Since I’m running out of space, I want to consider if this economic element changes the argument for fair use. What makes Equestria Girls different from I Knew Gary Was Trouble? Do they fall under the same or different cases of fair use?

Trademarks

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We have talked a lot about copyright, but what about trademarks? The two are rather similar: both are protections for texts or images or even methods. Trademarks, like the one posted here, are important for bigger companies who want to disseminate their brand and create brand loyalty. You always see that little TM on most labels (the superscript to Friendship is Magic) or even a little restrictive R (the one on My Little Pony). Trademarks are very powerful marketing tools. In my example, Hasbro owns the My Little Pony trademark, and thus also has rights to all artistic or commercial manifestations of the name like a copyright. Hasbro’s main goal is to make money. When it sees that one medium of My Little Pony is doing well, it will branch into other mediums, like a virus, until everything is infected by the MLP:FiM logo. It went from a show to having its own toys to clothes to trading cards to tattoos to party accessories to you name it. The trademark was everywhere, and everyone knew this was Hasbro. Though copyright has a large commercial interest, trademarks are the real sons and daughters of capitalism.