Let's Talk Girl Talk

Fair use, based on my understanding, is the allowance for an outside party to use a copyrighted piece for purposes of a parody, to comment on, or to criticize without violating copyright laws. Essentially, anyone can use a copyrighted work without permission of the creator as long as it for the purposes such as those listed above.

Transformative use is based off of the concept of fair use and is the grounds by which the music artist "Girl Talk" produces his music legally. Transformative use means that an outside party can use a copyrighted work in a new or unexpected way. This allows people to essentially reproduce the work with their own spin on it, thus creating an entirely new piece.

As I previously mentioned, "Girl Talk" is a prime example of how transformative use allows us to recreate copyrighted pieces to ultimately create our own works. Girl Talk takes various songs from any genre and creates what is referred to as a mash-up, where all the songs are sampled, beat-matched, and combined to create one track. The final product is a sound that listeners are familiar with, yet unfamiliar with, all at once. We hear samples from songs we know well and identify to one source (the source being the primary artist), but hear them in a way we did not previously recognize. With this, Girl Talk is legally cleared by way of transformative use.

Girl Talk is not the only artist to capitalize on the rights granted to use by fair and transformative use. The music duo The White Panda, very similar to the music style of Girl Talk, has mastered the art of mash-ups with over 150,000 followers on SoundCloud. Another example of fair and transformative use, outside of the music industry, is Seth Grahame-Smith's collaborative work with deceased author Jane Austin to produce the novel "Pride and Prejudice, and Zombies." The novel, clearly based of the classic "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austin recreates the story to be essentially the same plus zombies roaming everywhere. Grahame-Smith is allowed to use the same characters and plot line of the classic legally due to his own spin placed on the story.

Here is one of my favorite White Panda mash-ups based off hits songs by 

Notorious B.I.G. and Tom Petty.

Interactivity Post #3

Interactivity and Multimedia Interfaces by David Kirsh presents arguments and observational data that humans interact with their environments in various different ways. Kirsh gives several examples of ways we interact including: preparing the environment, maintaining the environment, and reshaping the cognitive congeniality of the environment. From these, Kirsh says that our understanding of how these examples simplify the complexity of our mental processes is the first, and arguably most important, step in designing the right sort of resources needed to design a learner controlled learning environment.

El Posto de Dos

    1) With which one of the network laws do you most agree? Why?

    Of the networks laws which we discussed in class, Reed’s Law, a summation of Web 2.0, seems to be the most relevant and applicable in our networking society and the law I most agree with. Reed’s Law states that the utility of large networks, primarily social networks in today’s age of networking, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. Reed states that a network that has “n’ members increases its utilities by 2 raised to the power of “n.” Compared to laws such as Metcalfe’s and Sarnoff’s, Reed’s Law shows much more rapid growth.

    This directly explains the age of “viral” we are experiencing on the Internet today. Take for example the Vine trend in which someone makes fun of another shoes by pointing at the person’s feet and yelling, “What are those?!” This started as a man with less than 200 Vine followers posting a video in which he performed this comedic act towards a police officer. “What are those” videos can now be found all over the Internet with thousands of victims. This can be said for many other Vine trends, such as “The Nae Nae,” “Or Nah,” and “Just Girly Things.”

Here are a few examples of vine trends portrayed through compilations on YouTube.

"What Are Those?!?!"

"Nae Nae"

"Or Nah"

2) How do you think people might get their information five years from now?

Technology has, over the years, proven to be anything but predictable; however, I find it hard to imagine a more efficient system in which people could gather information. We have actively found ourselves in the Google-age of technology, simply meaning that we have nearly any information imaginable at our fingertips. As if the ability to search for information is not enough, social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit can also steadily provide users with information on various topics from news to fun arts and crafts. While I can imagine there will be upgrades to the systems already in place, I do not foresee the Google-age being introduced to a new platform for gathering information. 

Baseball Wisdom - Bunting with Kent Murphy