Since a few weeks your Facebook account is not just a page with your latest thoughts and agricultural transactions. I remember visiting People magazine’s website, because I was conducting research for a class on movie marketing. The article I stumbled upon ( http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20363861,00.html#facebook_comment)
dealt with a 19 year old lead of the movie “Kick Ass” fathering his 43 year old fiance an being a stepdad to her 13 and 3 year old daughters.

Without further elaborating on the content, I found the article could have used some further proofreading and wanted to comment.

Once I scrolled down, I realized that I am already logged in over my Facebook profile.
That really caught me by surprise. I understand that Facebook is widely used, but I don’t think that connecting profiles to websites is serving our privacy.

On the contrary, it enable the participating websites to get a better idea of our individualized interests, opinions and by lack of attention on the side of the user probably also other things, like socioeconomic status, relatives etc.

How do you feel about your profile being connected to other websites?

Wow, I just read a very entertaining and informative blog post on the New York Times website by Kal Raustiala, a professor at UCLA Law School, and Chris Spriggim, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School. They have researched the effects of the porn equivalents of Youtube, and it is significant. I guess it makes sense that these web sites would do more harm to the porn industry than youtube does to the television or music industry. They highlight one website called Pornhub, which is the 53rd most visited website on the internet, compared to, CNN at number 59, New York Times at 96, Youtube at number 3, and then Vivid, a prominent American porn producer at number 19,543. The article goes on to point out that the porn dvd industry is declining severely. While this is also happening to other industries that are being affected by internet piracy, i think it is more damaging to the porn industry than the others. With music, television, and film, watching youtube clips can act as an advertisement or a form of promotion for the real product. However, in the porn industry i would imagine that the free internet clips act as a substitute, because as the article states, “Pornogrophy is, in large part, a utilitarian product, and for most consumers, the purpose for which it is employed is served just as well by a five minute porn-tube clip.” This is definitely not true of other more art driven piracy which is used for more cultural purposes than simply utilitarian. The long term effect that internet piracy will have on the porn industry in largely unknown. I think, based on these findings that it will be pretty large, but i am sure that based on demand society will never have a lack of porn. The article goes on to reveal that porn companies are trying to produce bigger scale projects such as 3D porn to compete with piracy. I guess people loved Avatar, right? Anyway, here is a link to a hysterical youtube clip of pornstars, or i’m sorry, “Performers” explaining why piracy is wrong. Enjoy.

<object width=”640″ height=”385″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/4xNzsTHA1nI&hl=en_US&fs=1&”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/4xNzsTHA1nI&hl=en_US&fs=1&” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”640″ height=”385″></embed></object>

The relationship between Bollywood and Hollywood exemplifies the complexities of international copyright. India’s film industries have been making “cultural copies” of Hollywood scripts for decades, but with the emergence of the Internet and other technologies, has recently become more visible in America. The term cultural copy is defined as “a nearly direct copy of a movie or other work from one culture into another culture”. This practice can be observed in Banda Yeh Bindaas Hai or This Guy is Fearless (2010), the controversial Indianized remake of American comedy, My Cousin Vinny (1992). American film company 20th Century Fox brought a $1.9 million copyright lawsuit against India’s BR Films company because of its illegal reproduction of the Oscar-award winning film. According to the Press Trust of India, “BR Films had been given permission to make a film based on the idea of the movie, but that rights for a Hindi-language remake had not been approved. A study of the script found it to be a ‘substantial reproduction’ of the US film and the storyline was identical.” What differentiates between this film simply being inspired by or using the idea from the original work, and infringing upon it, is its explicit lifting of scenes, sequence, storyline, and script content. This case was settled outside of the Calcutta High Court where it was originally filed, after BR Films compensated Fox $200,000 for its replication of My Cousin Vinny. In my opinion, this blatant display of cultural copying is not necessarily an issue, but becomes problematic when it inhibits two of the US Fair Use and Indian Fair Dealing purposes by: delving into markets that Hollywood has begun profiting from, such as the UK and India, and hindering Bollwood’s incentives for creating innovative works by relying on American films to ensure box-office success. Take a look at these photos from scenes in each of the films, striking resemblance, no?