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Interesting Read about the Mashup model, fair use and girl talk - NY Times

Bronies

Great article. I must admit to having had some of those very thoughts at different point this semester.

not actually news, but an interesting article on plagiarism from 2007. "The idea that culture can be property-intellectual property-is used to justify everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone." What do you all think of Lethem's article?

Really interesting potential retaliation against unfair U.S. trade practices with less enforcement of U.S. IP rights.

The Country music duo the "Bellamy Brothers" are upset over Britney song title's resemblance to their 1979 hit but it seem they will not be suing the popstar.

I know that the Bellamy Brothers specifically mention the title, but I think they would have a much stronger case on the basis of "fixing" the double entendre within the song: the BB's lyrics are "If I said you had a beautiful body / would you hold it against me" vs. Britney's "If I said I want your body now / would you hold it against me." That's pretty startlingly similar, and even if you can't copyright ideas, you can copyright the expression of those ideas... and there's enough overlap between the two to be persuasive.

Now that I know copying a song title doesn't count as copyright infringement, I wonder what percentage of a songs lyrics must be exactly the same as another song in order for that to count as copyright infringement. And even if the lyrics happen to be the same, can an artist still avoid a lawsuit if his or her melodic line/ chordal progression/ instrumentation is different enough to make the song "original"? I'm guessing that its a case-by-case thing...

Because Facebook does not have extensive copyright preferences, artists who share their work on this website are not guaranteed what will happen to their art down the line. As more people choose to use Facebook as a media sharing website, Facebook will have to re-evaluate what rights they grant to you as a user.

Personality rights, a subset of intellectual property/copyright, is a major issue among players in the NCAA.  

I think Mr. Gordon may have a good chance of winning the lawsuit. If you look at the original picture he drew, you can see that it was more than just an idea that was taken and used to make Kung Fu Panda. He even titled his own drawings "Kung Fu Panda Power." When comparing this to Rihanna's infringement for her S&M music video, I feel that Rihanna has a better chance of escaping charges for infringement than does Dreamworks, because Rihanna was able to take photos and recreate them originally into a different form of media. Kung Fu Panda, on the other hand, is an animated film, which means that these photos weigh more heavily because they were not really originally transformed, they are the same pictures, just moving. This will be an interesting case to follow.

The author recounts when he and his wife used their camera phones to snap a few pages from a decor book in Barnes and Noble for ideas to show their contractor. Do you think it is possible to regulate this kind of copying and do you think a cell phone photo of a page or two from a book justifies legal punishment?

Apple sues Amazon for starting an app store called appstore. Apple's app store is called "App Store". Too similar? In addtion, Amazon is selling a game "Angry Birds Rio" while Apple has the very popular game "Angry Birds" in their app store. I think its a little too similar

Films by Hitchcock, books by Virginia Woolf and Picasso's Guernica--just to name a few--are some of the works that are no longer readily accessible to the public. In a new case, Golan v. Holder, orchestra conductors, teachers and film archivists, are fighting for the right to perform, adapt and distribute creative works that they relied on for years without having to consider copyrights and their respective fees. Should these famous works be returned to the public domain?

"A federal appeals court upheld a ruling that EchoStar infringed TiVo patents for digital recording technology, raising hopes the long legal battle could end with a TiVo victory."

Who has rights to the Superman franchise?