McLeod

I find the example of Fox News and Al Franken’s copyright dispute hilarious because of the ridiculous argument. When Franken was faced with the comment that he was “increasingly unfunny”, Al Franken’s threat of a counter lawsuit, because he had trademarked “funny”, shows exactly how absurd these lawsuits have become (p.1). It seems that almost anything can have a copyright anymore and everyone must be extremely careful on what they say or do in fear of being sued.
In terms of being allowed to use copyrighted pieces, I believe the amount for which artists are charged in sampling other artist’s music is outrageous. I completely understand that song writers should be rewarded for their originality, but charging $1,000 per word is unnecessary (p.86). As “Scanner” explained, “he didn’t really mind” when Bjork sampled him on one of her albums. Scanner’s record company and lawyers, on the other hand, would not tolerate this. Even though Scanner was not concerned, this did not stop his record company from suing Bjork (p.94). Inevitably, Scanner put a halt to the suit which put him in a bad place. It turns out that, for the most part, the record companies are the real winners in these cases, not the sampled artist. The most absurd example of this is evident when John Fogerty, of Creedence Clearwater Revival, lost his copyrights to his old songs because of a bad contract (p.99). As time went on, he created a song that mimicked a previous creation and was sued for using his own song! I found this astonishing that a record company has such power over the musicians on their label.