I wrote before asking whether Beyoncé’s video of Run The World was Homage or ripoff? (Beyoncé’s Run The World (Girls) in comparison to M.I.A.’s Boyz). I didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other. I also thought this was an isolated occurrence, but apparently not.

Since then, here’s a video of her Countdown video spliced in with work of Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

And here’s another performance, this time of her 2011 Performance at the Billboard awards put side by side with a work by Lorella Cuccari.

You can read criticism against her here (Beyoncé accused of ‘stealing’ dance moves in new video | Stage | guardian.co.uk) and supporting her here (Bob Dylan, Beyonce Face Questions Of Artistic License : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR)

Reading this material, I had the following thoughts, many of them contradictory

• this is merely video sampling. If you think it is acceptable to sample audio, why not video or choreography
• this is more than just sampling, this is taking major ideas without credit and using it to make your own copy of an original work
• this is good for the artists that Beyoncé uses: they get far more recognition than they would if she did not use their material
• this is bad for the artists, since they don’t receive any financial benefit from Beyoncé or the record label, and they if weren’t for the Internet, they’d get no credit
• Beyoncé is a great artist, and all artists steal
• If Beyoncé is a great artist, what is she bringing to the work? And why does she take so liberally from these artists?
• This has nothing to do with Beyoncé: it has to do with the video director. Beyoncé is mostly a singer and a dancer who depends on the director
• This has alot to do with Beyoncé since she is likely heavily involved with the video

Contradictory thoughts aside, I think this would be a non-issue if Beyoncé asked choreographers up front for either new work or permission to use their work and that she adequately compensated them. Beyoncé is a big star, and no doubt makes alot of money. Some of that money should go to the other artists that she depends on.

If you haven’t heard of the The Billion Prices Project, you should check out this New Yorker article by James Surowiecki. In short,

 The B.P.P., which was designed by the M.I.T. economists Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon, gathers price data not via survey but, rather, by continuously scouring the Web for prices of online goods around the world. (In the U.S., it collects more than half a million prices daily—five times the number that the government looks at.) Using this information, Cavallo and Rigobon have succeeded in building what amounts to the first real-time inflation index. The B.P.P. tells us what’s happening now, not what was happening a month ago. For instance, after Lehman Brothers went under, in September, 2008, the project’s data showed that businesses started cutting prices almost immediately, which suggested that demand had collapsed. The government’s numbers, by contrast, didn’t show this deflationary pressure until that November. This year, there’s been a mild uptick in annual inflation, and again the B.P.P. detected the new trend before the Consumer Price Index did. That kind of early heads-up could help governments make more timely decisions.

It’s a brilliant example of how the smart combination of computing power and vast amount of data on the Internet to produce something not possible otherwise. Read the rest of the article to find out more of the B.P.P.