Fall 2023 Supplement to Brauneis & Schechter, Copyright: A Contemporary Approach

This Fall 2023 Supplement is the product of our effort to capture important developments in copyright law since the publication of the second edition of Copyright: A Contemporary Approach. It includes three Supreme Court decisions as principal cases: the fair use cases of Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. (p. 23) and Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (p. 41) and the 2020 decision about copyright protection for state statutes, Georgia v. Public.Resources.Org (p. 74).. (Because there are now so many Supreme Court fair use cases to cover, this supplement also includes a note on Harper & Row, Publishers v. Nation Enterprises (pp. 13-14), as an option to replace its treatment as a principal case in the second edition of the casebook. The supplement also includes notes on many other cases, and a few new features that we thought would enhance study of U.S. copyright law. It includes new material on copyright and artificial intelligence, both on the issue of AI authorship, (see the new notes on page 7-9), and the issue of infringement and fair use in training generative AI models (see the new feature on p. 21). Because the Copyright Claims Board (“CCB”) opened up its doors for business in June 2022, we have included a new section at the end of Chapter 6 on the CASE Act and CCB proceedings (p. 67). We have also completely revised Chapter 12.E., on digital audio transmission rights, and Chapter 12.F., on rights in pre-1972 sound recordings. The new Chapter 12.E. in this supplement, “Digital Streaming of Music After the Musical Works Modernization Act” (p. 101), now consists of a general introduction to copyright and the streaming of music, covering both rights in sound recordings and rights in musical works, and all of the relevant exclusive rights

Photographing desire: women exploring sexuality through auto-photography

Feminist debates since the second-wave movement frequently construct ‘women’s sexual liberation’ and resistance to patriarchal heteronormativity as oppositions. This framework oversimplifies the interwoven relationship between personal and cultural constructions of women’s sexuality; furthermore, it risks overlooking individuals’ lived experiences and emotions. This research investigates the multiplicity and complexity of ‘women’s sexual desire’ by engaging with feminist symbolic interactionism and ideas from queer theories. How does a woman negotiate her personal ‘web of desire’ within social conventions? The project adopts auto-photography – a participatory method incorporating self-photography, journaling and interviews – to engage 18 UK women residents from seven countries in the co-creation of knowledge. This method encourages women to actively develop ideas; thus, it has an activist potential to reveal underrepresented meanings of women’s sexuality. In addition, the methodology generates rich textual and visual materials that demonstrate the depth of participants’ self-analysis and reflexivity. Multiple analytical methods (thematic analysis, discourse and narrative analysis, social semiotics) are deployed to read the women’s narratives critically, as well as representing them as valid. Desire is fluid, and women explore its meanings through metaphors and symbols. The women’s understanding of desire is negotiated within four cultural sites – Christianity, ethnicity, popular culture and feminist ideas – through which they might adopt, reject or struggle with dominant sexual scripts. Their sexual feelings are embodied experiences that can be generated through four preconditions: a positive perception of body image, sensations, fantasy and intimate relationships. The diverse ways in which participants visualise their sexuality reaffirm that each woman’s desire can be understood as a web interwoven by personal identities, social interactions and cultural scenarios in a continuous process. In particular, the extensive references to popular culture suggest that its sexual scripts are influential in constructing women’s desire

a tumblr book

"This book takes an extensive look at the many different types of users and cultures that comprise the popular social media platform Tumblr. Though it does not receive nearly as much attention as other social media such as Twitter or Facebook, Tumblr and its users have been hugely influential in creating and shifting popular culture, especially progressive youth culture, with the New York Times referring to 2014 as the dawning of the “age of Tumblr activism.”   Perfect for those unfamiliar with the platform as well as those who grew up on it, this volume contains essays and artwork that span many different topics: fandom; platform structure and design; race, gender and sexuality, including queer and trans identities; aesthetics; disability and mental health; and social media privacy and ethics. An entire generation of young people that is now beginning to influence mass culture and politics came of age on Tumblr, and this volume is an indispensable guide to the many ways this platform works.

Photography and Social Life: An Ethnography of Chinese Amateur Photography Online

This dissertation explores the ‘middle-brow’ (Bourdieu, 1990) photography practices of contemporary Chinese people in the digital era and how they produce, circulate, and consume photographic images on and off the Internet. Through participant observation and interviews with Chinese photo hobbyists and professionals working in the visual-Internet industry based in London, Beijing, or in the virtual world, it asks how the marriage between photography and the Internet in China has been similar to, or distinct from, its counterparts in the rest of the world, consolidating a vernacular photo-scape that has emerged alongside China’s booming Internet economy and socio-economic transformation over the past forty years. The research further addresses the agencies of both individuals and images, which determine what people want from photography in today’s China and what photography wants from this new networked, mediated society. The dissertation moves across persons, communities, organisations, and real and virtual sites, making it a multi-sited ethnography that traces social relations and ‘the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space’ (Marcus, 1995: 96). The thesis presents a panoramic picture of the everyday practices carried out by Chinese amateur photographers, who are often imagined and categorised as the country’s middle class. The study focuses on two main aspects. The first is the activity of amateur photography, including the conspicuous consumption of photographic equipment and participation in relevant events, as well as social behaviours on and off of Internet photography platforms. The second involves the judgement and appreciation of photographic images on sites such as Tuchong, focusing on various kinds of aesthetic strategies around and within photographic images. The combination of the two has helped photo hobbyists in China to shape their values, career paths, and new identities in the context of digitalisation and the rise of social media

An analysis of smartphone commercials: multimodality and frames

The goal of this paper is to present the cultural model linked to smartphones (and its users) created in video advertisement. The first part of the paper consists of a theoretical introduction presenting major linguistic terms important for our research as well as a short introduction to advertising. For the research, we have chosen twelve smartphone commercials (from seven smartphone brands) featured on YouTube and launched between the years 2010 and 2016. We will be analyzing how the cultural model is constructed through video advertisement using different modes. We will be analyzing which techniques the commercials use in promoting their product and to what extent the viewer is informed about the product and other products advertised together with the targeted one. We wish to know who the mobile phone companies’ targeted audience is and what persuasion techniques they prefer in advertising. When promoting the product or the brand, the commercials emphasize one or more key features. We will be analyzing the following elements: accessibility, innovation, lifestyle and information. We will discuss product placement, reference and the power of endorsement. This paper shows how commercials make use of conceptual metaphor, metonymy, conceptual integration and multimodality

How the World Changed Social Media

How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of nine anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences.published_or_final_versio

Seeing self and world: everyday photography and young male adults with autism spectrum disorder

With digital image technologies proliferating in contemporary visual culture, the ubiquity of photographs suggests people produce, consume and share photographs widely and routinely, in multiple contexts and with different meanings attached to them. Creating these photographs involves decisions, actions and interventions the photographer makes to guide the viewer and convey a particular message. Illuminating the ways in which photography enables one specific, often overlooked group – young male adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) – to visually express the ways they see self and the world, this thesis develops a more inclusive understanding of everyday photographic practices. From the literature that has been reviewed for this study, there has been no investigation that offers a systematic and rigorous approach to empirical enquiry in an effort to explore the photographic image-making of young autistic male adults. The area that has been researched extensively is how autistic people perceive gaze patterns and focus on facial expressions in picture communication systems. While recent studies consider photography and analyse visual perception in ASD, there has been little collaborative discussion in the literature that encompasses autistic people’s own everyday photographic image-making and self-reflective thoughts. This study is one of the first to address this knowledge gap. The methodological framework developed for this qualitative investigation includes participatory visual research methods, and positions this study at the intersection of the recent advances in visual methodologies, and participatory creative methods. Using thematic analysis, the study identified key findings across two dimensions of ASD individuals’ photographic image-making; namely, the phenomenological and social dimensions. Participants’ insights were not only deeply fascinating in their own terms, but also challenged dominant assumptions of digital photography. This qualitative study underlines the importance of multiple senses in the act of taking photographs, while expanding an understanding of what constitutes autistic people’s visual and social worlds. The contribution to knowledge of this investigation is to (i) deepen the knowledge of young male adults with ASD and their everyday photographic practices; and (ii) extend the development of visual and creative research methods. Furthermore, working with this specific group sheds light on photographic practices more broadly

Copyright: A Contemporary Approach

This Fall 2022 Supplement is the product of our effort to capture important developments in copyright law since the publication of the second edition of Copyright: A Contemporary Approach. It includes three new principal cases. The first two are Supreme Court decisions: the 2021 fair use decision in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. (p. 18), and the 2020 decision about copyright protection for state statutes in Georgia v. Public.Resources.Org (p. 58).. The third is an excerpt from the Second Circuit’s fair use decision in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (p.37), a decision that the Supreme Court has decided to review, with oral argument scheduled for October 12, 2022. The portion of this opinion on “transformativeness” is likely making a one-time appearance in the supplement, to be replaced by the Supreme Court decision when it is issued, but we thought some folks would like to teach the Goldsmith case in the fall as the Supreme Court is considering it.The supplement also includes notes on many other cases, and a few new features that we thought would enhance study of U.S. copyright law. Because the Copyright Claims Board (“CCB”) opened up its doors for business this June, we have included a new section at the end of Chapter 6 on the CASE Act and CCB proceedings (p. 50). We have also completely revised Chapter 12.E., on digital audio transmission rights, and Chapter 12.F., on rights in pre-1972 sound recordings. The new Chapter 12.E. in this supplement, “Digital Streaming of Music After the Musical Works Modernization Act” (p. 84), now consists of a general introduction to copyright and the streaming of music, covering both rights in sound recordings and rights in musical works, and all of the relevant exclusive rights