The “Happy Birthday” Copyright Case Shows The Absurdity Of Current Copyright Law

How can a song from the 19th century be protected by copyright? Don’t songs (and other works) enter the public domain after a reasonable amount of time? Even Irving Berlin, who died at age 101 in 1980, couldn’t outlive the rights to his songs. Welcome to the crazy world of copyright law—or, as I prefer to call it, “Intellectual Property Rights Gone Wild!”

The Broad Museum’s Big Plans For Lending Works May Not Work Out

“The Broad is a hybrid. It is one part art museum, with an as-yet undefined program of changing exhibitions and a sizable permanent collection … It’s also one part lending library, with a mandate to circulate its holdings far and wide in the U.S. and abroad” – the first museum to have lending explicitly written into its mandate. But Christopher Knight has doubts about how this will work out in practice.

The Royal Ballet’s Next Big Star?

Born in Nairobi in 1992 to an English father and a Kenyan mother (she won’t talk about her parents), Hayward came to Britain aged two and was brought up by her paternal grand­parents, John and Diana, in Sussex. ‘They didn’t expect to have a child sprung on them and they couldn’t remember what to do, so they sat me down in front of a video of The Nutcracker,’ she says. ‘That was it.’

From This Weekend’s AJBlogs 09.13.15

  • Step Quickly; Don’t Fall Off the World Canadian dancer-choreographer Louise Lecavalier brings her  “So Blue” to New York Live Arts.  read more
    AJBlog: DancebeatPublished 2015-09-13
  • Ted, Tea and Arts Talk Our first lucky break came when my old friend, F. Cowles Strickland, founding-director of the Berkshire Playhouse at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, began to drop in on our practice sessions. He asked many intelligent questions which I…read more
    AJBlog: We The AudiencePublished 2015-09-13
  • Weekend Extra: A Film About Chuck Israels Following his five years as the bassist in the Bill Evans Trio, Chuck Israels worked with a variety of leaders, among them J.J. Johnson, Stan Getz, Herbie Hancock and Hampton Hawes. His repertory orchestra, The… … read more
    AJBlog: RiffTidesPublished 2015-09-12
  • Messages from Above Summation Dance celebrates its fifth anniversary at BAM Fisher. Members of Summation Dance (L to to R: Devin Oshiro, Megan Wubbenhorst, Allie Lochary, Angela Curotto, and Taryn Vander Hoop) hold Sumi Clements in Clements’ At…read more
    AJBlog: DancebeatPublished 2015-09-12

Study The Arts In College? You’ll Pay Later

“The world needs dancers and poets along with the future investment bankers and tech entrepreneurs streaming out of elite schools. The problem is that the dancers and poets are paying the same, ever-rising tuition, even though the necessary cost of running a good poetry program is probably not much more than it was in earlier times when college tuition was much less expensive than it is today.”