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Music Licensing Issue – Skins

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When my group for Portfolio 2 was talking about what to write about, copyright relating to music was brought up about one of the topics. This got me thinking about an issue that arose several years back with one of my favorite tv shows of all time, the award-winning English drama Skins. Among the many great things about this show, one of them was the use of great music. However, an issue arose when releasing the DVD for the show. There was an issue because licensing the music for the DVDs would come with a high cost. So, completely different music was chosen to be put in the episodes released to the DVDs. The only way to buy the episodes with the original scores is to purchase them on Itunes. This is a real shame, because the music was one of the things that contributed to this show’s greatness. It almost feels as if something is lost with the original songs taken out.

Connections with TV

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Today while watchingg one of my favorite television shows, the British comedy “Peep Show”, I came across a scene which relates excellently with the main themes of the class. In this episode, one of the main characters, Mark, is offered the chance to have his book published by a shady publishing company. In the offer, the company wants Mark to give them a payment of 2000 pounds, promising him that they will sell many copies of the book and make him rich. Against the advice of his friend Jeremy, Mark takes the offer and makes the down payment. Unfortunately for Mark, he soon finds out he has been scammed. The copies of the book end up not being legitimate. Rather, they are produced cheaply through photocopying, with no effort done to make them look presentable. As a result, nobody buys the book. This scam illustrates the importance of copyright laws. The fake publishing company knew that Mark not only didn’t have a copyright on his work, but wasn’t very concerned with this aspect of the book selling industry. As a result, the people running the scam knew that they would be able to get away with their devious plot fairly easily.