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 casting Christian reformer Martin Luther as died-in-the-wool party member. Never mind that Luther died hundreds of years before the Communist Party was a thing. Never mind that communism traditionally took a dim view of organized religion.  “Most of the major Martin Luther sites were in, what was at the time, East Germany,” says Anderson.  Middle East Panel  Guests: Steven Lobell, political science professor at University of Utah  John MacFarlane, political science adjunct professor at Utah Valley University  Fred Axelgard, senior fellow at the Wheatley Institution at BYU  Forty-seven Republican senators signed an open letter to the Iranian government this week warning them against making a nuclear deal directly with the Obama Administration. Secretary of State John Kerry has called the letter irresponsible as he faces a March 24 deadline to establish a framework for the nuclear deal. But Republicans in Congress have signaled they’re unlikely to approve it.  “The letter is wrong in asserting that the future congress can amend this agreement,” says Axelgard on the open letter to the Iranian government.  “President Obama needs congress to permanently eliminate these sanctions,” says Lobell.  “If they don’t have this agreement, Iran will accelerate,” says MacFarlane.  “What’s going to happen when you add a war with Iran with everything you already have in the Middle East?” asks Axelgard.  Air Masks  Guest: Yi Cui, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University  Many U.S. cities and states have air quality problems and even offer public warnings about when it’s unsafe to exert ourselves outside. But none of our communities compares to the pollution some 20-million people living in Beijing, China experience daily. One report by Shanghai researchers described Beijing’s atmosphere as almost “uninhabitable for human beings.” And visitors are often initially taken-back at the sight of people everywhere wearing face masks to protect themselves from the pollution.  “Particles can go through filters, they have holes and they are big. What’s bad is this particle will go into people’s lungs and get stuck and release the toxic stuff and it’s just terrible,” says Cui.