Copyrights, Everyday Joy, Martin Luther and Communism

Blurred Lines and Copyright  Guest: Ed Carter, attorney, journalist, and associate professor of communications at BYU  Does “Blurred Lines”, a song by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, sound like Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up”? We talk copyright laws on Top of Mind.   “The idea really is we want to provide enough of an incentive for people to create things so that they will make money at the end of the day and spend the time making it,” says Carter on the Copyright Act.  “The jury determined that the songs were substantially similar,” says Carter.  “The bigger question is: can we all as content users and content creators, rely on the abilities of the works that have come before us and make something new?” says Carter. “There’s going to be borrowing, building on, repurposing, reusing. That’s just a part of new creations.” Joy in Everyday Moments  Guest: Ting Zhang, doctoral student in the Organizational Behavior Program at Harvard Business School  Think for a moment about your best memories in life. We tend to place a premium on the “headline events” like a wedding or the birth of a child or a college graduation ceremony. But new research out of the Harvard Business School, finds reflecting on every day, ordinary experiences can bring more joy than we might realize.  “We see that people are again and again systematically underestimating the value of rediscovering those moments down the road,” says Zhang.  Martin Luther and Communism  Guest: Stewart Anderson, assistant professor of History at BYU  Political movements have always tried to co-opt the past. Both Republicans and Democrats, for example, invoke the nation’s Founding Fathers in support of their own views. For a darker take, consider how the terror group ISIS invokes Muhammad—the founder of Islam—to try to legitimize their extreme and brutal activities.  BYU History Professor Stewart Anderson has been delving into one example of this from East Germany in the mid-1980s when a flagging communist government tried to bolster its base by casti