Julianna Yau’s blog

Throughout the lecture, I was hurriedly making notes as I tried to absorb and process the information being thrown at me. Some of the questions I jotted down were:

• Is there really more benefit to society if the work is fixed? This becomes not only a matter of retaining valuable works (as not to keep everything, thereby cluttering the repository of works), but whether all works are more valuable when fixed.
• There was mention of the fact that unrecorded conversations are not protected by copyright, but conversations which are recorded become protected by copyright. What impact does this have to companies which record the conversations of their customer service staff while on the phone? Although they hold the rights to the recording, the parties being recorded own the actual conversation. Does their use of the recordings for training purposes fall under the educational clause of fair usage? What if they use the conversation in a manner other from training?
• If a musician authorizes recordings of his/her concerts to attendees, what happens to the royalties which may exist from the resale of those recordings? Would we assume that the authorization was made royalty-free, or would that fall into a fee schedule somewhere?
• What happens to copyright on an unfinished, fixed work? There are many known instances of unfinished artistic and literary works (and I’m sure the same applies to dramatic and musical works) which are published in one form or another. Although these publications usually come with discussions of whether the creator would have wanted an unfinished work published (and the societal value of such publication), I’m not aware of any discussions regarding whether copyright can exist for unfinished work. If I start a sculpture but never finish it, would someone be able to duplicate the unfinished work without violating copyright law? What happens if I later finish that sculpture, thereby making it no longer the same as the “sculpture” which was duplicated? Would the duplications only violate copyright if I had somehow fixed the original, unfinished work (e.g. photographically)? Is the work-in-progress considered to be inherently fixed? Surely duplicating a work at any stage is in violation of copyright because it does not clear the originality clause.

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