Blog 4: Fair Use and Transformative Use

I think that Girl Talk should be fair use. If Girl Talk is not fair use than a DJ profiting off their music would not be considered Fair Use. Girl Talk is not trying to take credit for something that has already been made, they are using already produced music to make new music. In this situation I believe that the music that is mashed up could just be the equivalent of sounds. Any music producer out there has used pre-recorded sounds to create new music. What Girl Talk is doing and what any other DJ is doing is producing the regular music that has evolved, they are building off of ideas. As Girl Talk himself put it, "sampling is his instrument." I believe that as long as he is not saying that he built his instrument it should be legal. I could see this being a problem if he illegally downloaded that music that he uses. In that case the original creator would've made no profit and it would be like Girl Talk had stolen his instrument. Transformative Law I think is a good way to support DJing in general. There is a public interest in DJing as a genre in music. There are plenty of DJs today releasing music that uses part from other musician's work.
In a communications law class I took we talked about the case of Campbell vs. Acuff-Rose. This lawsuit was on a parody of the song Pretty Woman by 2 Live Crew. They used the music from the song pretty woman but had all new lyrics. 2 Live Crew won this case because it was different enough from the original to constitute their song to be their own work. I think that Girl Talk's music should be fair use as well because he is using many different parts of songs, not one song in particular, as his instrument. In the end he has something very different from the original.

Blog 3 - Interactivity

This article discusses a study on interactivity in shop window displays. In a world with so much information coming at us at once this study faces the same problem as everyone else; catching the attention of someone just passing by. The article cites three things that need to happen to have successful interactivity: (1) notice the display, (2) understand that it is interactive, and (3) be motivated to interact with it (not necessarily in this order). These three thing definitely translate into internet communication. With so much content available to us through the internet 24/7 we first need to be able to draw the attention of a user. Also, if the user does not understand what is supposed to be interactive they will move on. And finally, one way to motivate a user is through ease of interactivity. A person cruising the internet isn't usually going to stick with something they don't understand or can't figure out how to operate.
For the article's study they came to three conclusions that can be related to internet communication. One, content gains more attention from a user by personally relating or mirroring the user. Two, gaining attention can take time. For a user to really interact they may have to visit the site more than one time. And finally, attention from other users can be enough to get another user's interaction.

Müller, J., Walter, R., Bailly, G., Nischt, M., & Alt, F. (2012, May). Looking glass: a field study on noticing interactivity of a shop window. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 297-306). ACM.

http://www.joergmueller.info/pdf/CHI12MuellerLookingGlass.pdf