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Question_1/Essay_2_Question

Question_1/Proper Summary Procedure – x
Proper Summary Procedure

Once you’ve identified the passage (thesis, argument) to be summarized, do the following:

1. Know the Passage

Read it, re-read it and re-read it again; Take notes; Do a Who / What analysis: Briefly answer the questions “Who” “What” “Where” “When” “Why” and “How” as part of your notetaking process; Before you begin drafting your summary you should know the passage so well, you could tell someone in your own words what it says without having to look at the passage.

2. Set the original aside

Looking at the original while you draft will greatly increase the chances of unintentional plagiarism.

3. Get something down

Using your notes, your Who/What analysis and your memory, make an attempt to summarize the passage. Understand that it won’t be perfect.

4. Go back to the original and check your summary for the following (in order):

A. Precision of the Language: Make sure you haven’t butchered the language! Revise for clarity and precision. You might have to revise several times to get the language right.
B. Accuracy: Make sure your summary accurately captures the intent of the original passage.
C. Violations of the Four Word Rule: Get in there and count! Make sure you have not unintentionally plagiarized the original passage.

Question_1/Sample Summary Paper – x
Sample Summary Paper:

Thesis
Lessig claims that we need to find a means of protecting artist’s financial interests while also continuing to encourage technological innovation through certain forms of piracy or theft.

First argument
He tells us all of our major media had its origins in theft. For example, filmmakers travelled to Hollywood, California in an attempt to avoid the patent protections Thomas Edison held on filmmaking technology. They thought California was far enough away that federal law enforcement couldn’t reach. By the time federal law enforcement caught up to these filmmakers, the patents had already expired.

Rest of Summary
[include one more example – i.e. cable tv].
Lessig argues that some forms of piracy are clearly beneficial because they promote innovation in technology. For this reason, he’d like to see person to person file sharing encouraged, so long as we can find a way to protect the artists from those who would make a profit from selling their work.

**** When writing your actual summary paper, DO NOT INCLUDE THE RED HEADERS ABOVE. I have inserted these to help clarify the process. Your actual summary paper (on “The Closing of the American Book”) should be in traditional paragraph form.

Question_1/Some Like It Hot — x
Some Like It Hot
OK, P2P is “piracy.” But so was the birth of Hollywood, radio, cable TV, and (yes) the music industry.
If piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission, then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of big media today – film, music, radio, and cable TV – was born of a kind of piracy. The consistent story is how each generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Each generation – until now.
The Hollywood film industry was built by fleeing pirates. Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast to California in the early 20th century in part to escape controls that film patents granted the inventor Thomas Edison. These controls were exercised through the Motion Pictures Patents Company, a monopoly “trust” based on Edison’s creative property and formed to vigorously protect his patent rights.

California was remote enough from Edison’s reach that filmmakers like Fox and Paramount could move there and, without fear of the law, pirate his inventions. Hollywood grew quickly, and enforcement of federal law eventually spread west. But because patents granted their holders a truly “limited” monopoly of just 17 years (at that time), the patents had expired by the time enough federal marshals appeared. A new industry had been founded, in part from the piracy of Edison’s creative property.
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Meanwhile, the record industry grew out of another kind of piracy. At the time that Edison and Henri Fourneaux invented machines for reproducing music (Edison the phonograph; Fourneaux the player piano), the law gave composers the exclusive right to control copies and public performances of their music. Thus, in 1900, if I wanted a copy of Phil Russel’s 1899 hit, “Happy Mose,” the law said I would have to pay for the right to get a copy of the score, and I would also have to pay for the right to perform it publicly.
But what if I wanted to record “Happy Mose” using Edison’s phonograph or Fourneaux’s player piano? Here the law stumbled. If I simply sang the piece into a recording device in my home, it wasn’t clear that I owed the composer anything. And more important, it wasn’t clear whether I owed the composer anything if I then made copies of those recordings. Because of this gap in the law, I could effectively use someone else’s song without paying the composer anything. The composers (and publishers) were none too happy about this capacity to pirate.
In 1909, Congress closed the gap in favor of the composer and the recording artist, amending copyright law to make sure that composers would be paid for “mechanical reproductions” of their music. But rather than simply granting the composer complete control over the right to make such reproductions, Congress gave recording artists a right to record the music, at a price set by Congress, after the composer allowed it to be recorded once. This is the part of copyright law that makes cover songs possible. Once a composer authorizes a recording of his song, others are free to record the same song, so long as they pay the original composer a fee set by the law. So, by limiting musicians’ rights – by partially pirating their creative work – record producers and the public benefit.
A similar story can be told about radio. When a station plays a composer’s work on the air, that constitutes a “public performance.” Copyright law gives the composer (or copyright holder) an exclusive right to public performances of his work. The radio station thus owes the composer money.
But when the station plays a record, it is not only performing a copy of the composer’s work. The station is also performing a copy of the recording artist’s work. It’s one thing to air a recording of “Happy Birthday” by the local children’s choir; it’s quite another to air a recording of it by the Rolling Stones or Lyle Lovett. The recording artist is adding to the value of the composition played on the radio station. And if the law were perfectly consistent, the station would have to pay the artist for his work, just as it pays the composer.
But it doesn’t. This difference can be huge. Imagine you compose a piece of music. You own the exclusive right to authorize public performances of that music. So if Madonna wants to sing your song in public, she has to get your permission.
Imagine she does sing your song, and imagine she likes it a lot. She then decides to make a recording of your song, and it becomes a top hit. Under today’s law, every time a radio station plays your song, you get some money. But Madonna gets nothing, save the indirect effect on the sale of her CDs. The public performance of her recording is not a “protected” right. The radio station thus gets to pirate the value of Madonna’s work without paying her a dime.
No doubt, one might argue, the promotion artists get is worth more than the performance rights they give up. Maybe. But even if that’s the case, this is a choice that the law ordinarily gives to the creator. Instead, the law gives the radio station the right to take something for nothing.
Cable TV, too: When entrepreneurs first started installing cable in 1948, most refused to pay the networks for the content that they hijacked and delivered to their customers – even though they were basically selling access to otherwise free television broadcasts. Cable companies were thus Napsterizing broadcasters’ content, but more egregiously than anything Napster ever did – Napster never charged for the content it enabled others to give away.
Broadcasters and copyright owners were quick to attack this theft. As then Screen Actors Guild president Charlton Heston put it, the cable outfits were “free-riders” who were “depriving actors of compensation.”
Copyright owners took the cable companies to court. Twice the Supreme Court held that the cable companies owed the copyright owners nothing. The debate shifted to Congress, where almost 30 years later it resolved the question in the same way it had dealt with phonographs and player pianos. Yes, cable companies would have to pay for the content that they broadcast, but the price they would have to pay was not set by the copyright owner. Instead, lawmakers set the price so that the broadcasters couldn’t veto the emerging technologies of cable. The companies thus built their empire in part upon a piracy of the value created by broadcasters’ content.
As the history of film, music, radio, and cable TV suggest, even if some piracy is plainly wrong, not all piracy is. Or at least, not in the sense that the term is increasingly being used today. Many kinds of piracy are useful and productive, either to create new content or foster new ways of doing business. Neither our tradition, nor any tradition, has ever banned all piracy.
This doesn’t mean that there are no questions raised by the latest piracy concern – peer-to-peer file-sharing. But it does mean that we need to understand the harm in P2P sharing a bit more before we condemn it to the gallows.
Like the original Hollywood, P2P sharing seeks to escape an overly controlling industry. And like the original recording and radio industries, it is simply exploiting a new way of distributing content. But unlike cable TV, no one is selling the content that gets shared on P2P services. This difference distinguishes P2P sharing. We should find a way to protect artists while permitting this sharing to survive.
Much of the “piracy” that file-sharing enables is plainly legal and good. It provides access to content that is technically still under copyright but that is no longer commercially available – in the case of music, some 4 million tracks. More important, P2P networks enable sharing of content that copyright owners want shared, as well as work already in the public domain. This clearly benefits authors and society.
Moreover, much of the sharing – which is referred to by many as piracy – is motivated by a new way of spreading content made possible by changes in the technology of distribution. Thus, consistent with the tradition that gave us Hollywood, radio, the music industry, and cable TV, the question we should be asking about file-sharing is how best to preserve its benefits while minimizing (to the extent possible) the wrongful harm it causes artists.
The question is one of balance, weighing the protection of the law against the strong public interest in continued innovation. The law should seek that balance, and that balance will be found only with time.

Question_1/The Lesson on Lessig Part One – x
The Lesson on Lessig, Part One

We will be practicing our summary skills on the essay entitled “Some Like it Hot” by Lawrence Lessig. Take your time. Don’t rush through this page! Follow it step by step, while looking at the Lessig article. Don’t move on to the next step until you have completely understood the previous one.

The Thesis
The General Guidelines for the summary paper call for us to first put the author’s thesis into our own words. In order to do this we have to find where exactly the author’s thesis is. Please note that it won’t always be as hard to find an author’s thesis as it is with this particular article.

Make sure you have read the article carefully at least once at this point before your continue.
Many students believe Lessig’s thesis is to be found in the first paragraph, most specifically with the sentence: “Every important sector of big media today – film, music, radio, and cable TV – was born of a kind of piracy.”
But this is not the thesis.
How do we know? Because only the examples found in the first two thirds of the paper actually attempt to support that claim. Starting with the sentence “As the history of film, music, radio, and cable TV suggest, even if some piracy is plainly wrong, not all piracy is”, Lessig clearly pivots away from the past to the present (or at least the time when Lessig is writing the article). The last one third of the article makes the argument in favor of person to person file sharing based on the examples he has given us from the past.
The thesis, then, is to be found in the last paragraph: “The question is one of balance, weighing the protection of the law against the strong public interest in continued innovation.”
Because the thesis appears at the very end, Lessig assumes we have garnered enough information earlier in the essay to know exactly what he means here, even if he is being a little elliptical. To understand the thesis adequately, you may need to go back and read that last third of the article more carefully and try to answer the following questions:
1. Who exactly needs the “protection of the law”?
2. What of theirs need protecting?
3. What specific type of innovation is Lessig referring to?
4. How does this innovation come about?
Once you have answered these questions, you can go ahead and make an attempt at summarizing / paraphrasing the thesis. Be sure to use the proper summary technique:
Know the passage
Put the original aside
Get something down
Go back to the original and check for:
A. Precision of the language
B. Accuracy
C. Violations of the four-word rule
You are now ready to complete the exercise due March 25th. Go to the drop box entitled “Exercise due March 25th”, read the directions carefully before submitting, and free feel to email me any SPECIFIC questions you have about the assignment.