Topic Video: Law

Hi everyone!

Here's a video on the origins of copyright law, and on the difference between what it was created for and what it is used for nowadays. The views of the author of the video are not necessarily my own, but he does raise a question. Who benefits from extending copyright to 70 years after the demise of the author? Heirs, companies?

I like the topic precisely because there doesn't seem to be a right or wrong answer to it, so the best way to argue in favour or against is by giving examples.

In any case, I'm using this video for you to find conditionals. The guy speaks fairly quickly, so turn on the captions for the difficult ones. All the conditionals I could catch are here.

The opposite of copyrighted material is public domain. A folk story, for example, is public domain. I wonder how it works with reworkings of that public domain story? For instance, The Little Mermaid. Could I make a film based on that? Or is it copyrighted since Disney made a version of it? I suppose if I go back to the source material, I could do it, but what if it looked "suspiciously similar" to the Disney story? I love to imagine those cases where definitions are slippery. What do you think?

Enjoy it!

Conditional hunt: the size of the universe

Back from a long break...

What's a conditional hunt? Well, in this blog, it is an activity that consists in finding as many conditional clauses as possible in one single video. The function of conditional clauses and hypothesis here, particularly at the end of the video, is to try to explain a concept in terms that we can understand. Given that the size of the universe is impossible for us to picture, Pete Edwards of the University of Durham resorts to an imaginary situation:

Supposing our galaxy were the size of a grain of sand, how big would the universe be?


So, let's open our ears! Go to the link above and try to find as many conditionals as possible! The solution, coming up in the comments. But don't forget to contribute with your own comments, telling us how many you found!

A nice idiomatic expression to start the video : "you'll never get your head around how big the universe is"

to get your head (a)round something: to be able to understand or accept something (OALD)

Regrets: I Will Survive

A video to work on conditionals and well, tenses in general.

The chorus comes up several times, so take advantage of that! there are some tricky contractions...

Don't miss the choreography!