Entertainment Law Podcast Reviews
Week 4 Industry Expert Blog Assignment
For this blog post, I'll be
reviewing three different podcasts on the subjects of law, entertainment,
technology, and the intermingling of those topics.
This podcast is
part of a series on intellectual property law presented by Cambridge
University’s Center for Intellectual Property and Information Law. In this podcast,
the speaker, Nic Garnet, basically gives a bit of background on recent
advancements in technology, and how different media industries have attempted
to stay ahead of the technology curve and protect their interests. The speaker
gave personal insight as one of the legal participants as the music and film
industries attempted to develop rights management technologies to ensure that
copyright owners were adequately compensated for the use of their copyrighted
material. The speaker closed by describing how digital rights management (DRM)
came to be, how it enabled the Apple Corporation to gain such a large share of
their market, and how public dissatisfaction led to it’s undoing. At the
conclusion of this podcast, it is apparent that copyright protection and rights
management are still relevant issues that have not yet reached a point of
resolution.
The next podcast
I am reviewing is entitled Entertainment Law and Challenges of Celebrity. This
podcast is produced by Lawyer2Lawyer Law News and Legal Topics. The participants
in this blog are Bob Ambrogi and Gordon Firemark. In this podcast, Mr. Firemark
spoke of some of the issues that amateur and professional content creators
encounter in the process of creating new forms of media such as blogs,
podcasts, websites, and even Youtube videos. He described how many content
creators are unaware of what can be considered copyright infringement, and as a
result, often find themselves in legal hot water due to their ignorance. In
addition, Mr. Firemark spoke of some of the recent celebrity fiascos that have
made the rounds in mass media. He spoke of how life in the public eye can
emphasize the flaws of celebrities. Another intriguing point made during the
course of the podcast was the fact that most celebrity employment contracts no
longer contain morality clauses as a general procedure, but may included them
if actors are a behavioral or insurance risk to the employer. Overall, this is
an intriguing podcast, which gives an insiders perspective on the world of
entertainment law in relation to celebrities.
The final
podcast I have chosen to review is a selection from the intellectual property scholars
conference at Paul University. This particular podcast is presented by Ms.
Lydia Loren, and expounds upon the subject of aligning incentives with reality.
Ms. Loren began the podcast by emphasizing the fact that she once found herself
mad at the pope. She began to explain that her reason for being mad was the
fact that the Catholic Church was claiming copyright over certain catholic
documents including Catholic Church documents and content created during the
process of Catholic Church services. She stated that the idea of restricting
the use of these documents would prevent their pervasion among the population,
which would seem to be opposed to the overreaching goals of the Catholic
Church. In addition, The Vatican has threatened to sue publishers and reporters
who infringe upon these alleged copyrights. Ms. Loren asserts that the Pope (and
by extension the Catholic Church) does not need copyrights. She continues by
saying that she believes that there are other creative documents that do not
need copyright protection in order to provide an incentive to create them. Some
of the types of works she believes to fall into this category are things such
as e-mail messages, legal building codes, personal photography, advertising, etc.
She then says that these creations are not created for the exclusive
compensation benefit associated with copyrights; however, all of these types of
creations are eligible for copyright protection under current law. In what I
believe to be an insightful epiphany, Ms. Loren states that many copyright
cases and threats of copyright cases are more motivated by personal privacy
concerns than market based concerns. She states that these types of concerns
would be much better served by trademarks or certification marks. Ms. Loren
asserts that changing the scope of protection for different categories of
copyrighted works would ease the financial and opportunity cost burden of the
current copyright system on the general public. Overall, this is an
entertaining and thought provoking podcast, which points out some flaws in the
current copyright system and offers some potential solutions.
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