Friday, October 19, 2012

Copyright: Week 8 - Midterm Time!

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Both a lot and a little has happened in Lawcast-land recently. Brian was sick. I was out of town for a funeral. I've completed 3/4 of my midterms and if I had to guess, I'd guess Brian was done with midterms.

We've also missed 3 days of normal class periods in the two-week period. Last week  we had class canceled  on Tuesday due to Columbus Day. That left us with one day of infringement last week. With all the craziness, I think I'm going to do infringement all together during Week 9. That will allow Brian and I to get back on the same schedule. I don't know if he's still planning to do a rebuttal/critique for the Week 6 stuff, which was boundary issues.

You probably noticed that Brian did a post on trademark law. One of the reasons for that was that we had no copyright class this week (1 from last week + 2 from this week = 3). With the week off, I spent some time looking ahead in the syllabus only to find out that there is a section of Chapter 5 with the subheading "Copyright and the Music Industry". Unfortunately, our course skips over that section entirely. I've begun reading the section and it discusses things such as the differences between "musical works" and "sound recordings," among other things (the section is 32 pages long).

I'll continue to spend some time reading those pages. I'll bring the material to the fore as necessary to discuss other aspects of copyright law the rest of this semester and in future semesters (next semester Brian and I plan to take Music Law, for example).

That's all for this week. I just wanted to mention where we are headed and explain why things haven't fit the normal schedule the last couple of weeks!