#postbyella

The DMCA protects “Internet service providers from liability for copyright infringement by their users, if the Internet service provider meets certain statutory requirements”. Yet there are times that the DMCA does not properly check if users are in fact infringing the law, and thus misinterpret what is considered fair use and what is not. For example, in 2009 Stephanie Lenz recorded a 20 second long home-made video of her baby dancing to Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy song from a CD player in the kitchen and uploaded it on YouTube so her family and friends could have access to it. As a result, Universal emitted a takedown notice claiming that the home video infringed the multinational’s copyrights to Prince’s song. When Stephanie learned YouTube had taken down her video, she hired a lawyer who sent YouTube a counter notice, claiming that her video was actually protected under fair use. This case is a perfect example of how copyright owners are being over vigilant and/or how section of the DMCA are being misread.

Although this is not a real product from the Coca-Cola Company, this parody commercial suggests a possible "cure" to social media, by taking the social out of media and putting it back into our lives. It is interesting how there seems to be a consensus in regards to the fact that technology is making us anti-social and therefore we should avoid it, at least in actual social settings. 

I came across this video and I have to say that watching it felt like I was traveling back in time, even though it didn't happen so long ago.

“Our understandings of what constitutes a “new” medium have shifted in a subtle but significant way. For the better part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “new” media were primarily understood as “new” with respect to other media: “new” media forms replaced older forms. […] Yet computers and other digital media actually embody a different model of newness: computers have reached a point where their “newness” references other computers and not other media” (Sterne, 18).