Copyright Laws!

After reading through this I found myself to get really annoyed with copyright laws. The case that is absolutely ridiculous is Girl Scouts and singing happy birthday! If i was the one that created happy birthday, I would be happy that it would become that popular and thousands of people would be singing it everyday and not care about the money that was coming in! The happy birthday song should just be considered a freedom of speech and they should not have any copyright laws on it. The author makes many great cases about copyright laws in this article. The Girl scout case stood out to me the most but another one I thought was interesting was about Bill O'reily and Fox news just taking things out of hand.

I am a jazz studies minor, and play in Jazz Band One. Jazz Band one has had a rich tradition of recording some amazing albums since the early 90's. One thing with Jazz Music, many tunes that are written by certain artist are copyrighted in that case anytime you want to record a tune written by an artist you have to pay royalty fees in order to have it. I agree with this because who ever put in the time to creating the music deserves to get some credit for it. It would get pretty bad if you had to pay a fee every time you practiced or just performed a jazz musicians tune without recording. I feel we need to show respect to the musicians and give them what they deserve in doing the right thing and paying them if others want to record there music.

When I was playing in band in high school we had a solo festival we would go to every year where we had to prepare a piece to play in front of a judge, and you had to have to original copy's of that solo and could not photo copy a solo because of certain copyright laws, I feel that was kind of unfair because some music gets expensive!

Copyright laws are just getting out of hand, an article I just read recently about Snooki who is on the Jersey Shore was trying to copyright her name! She felt no one should have it except her! She has made a ton of money already from being on the show who really cares if other people have the same nickname as her? Some famous Artist try to copyright certain slogans used in there music and they will sue people if they are used. Some artist make so much money as it is that they should not even care because whats an extra million dollars gonna do on top of the already billions of dollars some artist have made from albums, concerts and t-shirts they have sold. Some artist are really ignorant and others just care about the music which is they way it should be.

Music sharing with copyright laws has gotten pretty out of hand ever since music has entered the digital world. I know Itunes now does not allow sharing because if you try to send a song you bought to a friend then your friend would need your password and user name in order to access the song otherwise it would be locked. Dave Matthews band started off by just having there shows recorded and given out on cassette tapes for free, and look at where they are now! They are one of the top touring bands of all time and they are all practically billionaires with all the shows they have done and items sold. You are finding a lot more artist doing stuff on there own by selling stuff through there own website because record labels just want to copyright a lot of the stuff and keep most of the profits for themselves and not give the artist what they deserve!

Copyright laws are just getting out of hand, and if people are wanting to get something copyrighted then they really need to think about it and wonder if they are being selfish or not. The author did a great job in all the examples he used in the reading by saying the copyright laws are just getting way out of hand!