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It’s that time again! My favorite shows I’ve seen this year, listed chronologically, along with comments about each and a dash of shameless self-promotion. Full list of everything I saw this year at the end.

Once again the worlds education system has failed a lot of you…Kesha did NOT lose her case against Dr. Luke. That case will be handled at a later time. She lost her request for a preliminary breach of her contract that would allow her to release music not made by Luke but still have Sony promote it. The judge said she is allowed to release new music but Sony contractually does not have to promote it unless he produces it. Please please PLEASE stop buying into articles with clickbait headlines meant to make you think that more extreme things are happening when this is just another level in a complex legal battle.

Meanwhile, the New York Daily explains:

She claims he (Dr Luke) holds her exclusive contract, and even though Sony has offered to let her work with another producer, Kesha said she feared the company wouldn’t promote her music if she’s paired with a different partner.

[…]

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Shirley Kornreich said she thought Sony would suffer irreparable harm if Kesha was not compelled to abide by a contract that requires her to make six more albums with the company.Kesha had asked the judge to issue a preliminary injunction that would bar Sony from forcing her to work with Dr. Luke and to cancel her contracts. […] She also noted that Sony had offered to let Kesha work with another producer.Kesha’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, argued that Sony’s promise was “illusory” because even if the recordings were made, the record company wouldn’t promote them. He contended that Sony had more invested in Dr. Luke than in Kesha and it would do everything to protect him because he makes them more money.

The judge was critical of those claims as well, saying she didn’t think the information provided by Kesha’s lawyers was detailed enough to keep her civil rights, sexual harassment and discrimination claims alive. However, the judge postponed making a decision on the dismissal motions.

I thought this was coming! I hadn’t posted about it because frankly I was still forming my opinion.

For those who haven’t seen, a woman named Erin Pike just ended a brief run of her show that’swhatshesaid, where she examined the roles (and lack thereof) of women in the 11 plays listed by American Theatre as the most-produced plays of the 2014-2015 season by lifting dialogue and stage directions from them and forming them into her own show. She received a cease and desist from Sam French specifically for her use of text from Bad Jews, which she then removed from the production but retained the rest of the text and read the cease and desist letter onstage. More publishers and playwrights have come forward to dispute her plagarism and/or fair use of the text.

@mildlybitter wrote a great article really examining the legal repercussions and fair use with regard to this production, and as she actually is a lawyer and a feminist and a theatergoer, I trust her take on the whole thing.

I think the statement Pike is trying to make is valuable, pointing out that even shows we think of as having strong female leads (Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike and Venus in Fur are included in her list) still may be lacking in the way they portray women. And I don’t think she’s trying to perform Bad Jews or Vanya Sonia verbatim (where in my mind the copyright issue would come in), just to comment on them as part of a larger conversation.  I’m also looking at how David Adjimi’s 3C was eventually cleared of charges for copyright infringement because it was “transformational use,” which seems to apply here too.  Because of that, I think it would fall under fair use.