Law and Magic Blog

You Has a Tell

What to do about feline gambling addiction?

I Can Has Cheezburger. com

Internet Resources For Halloween

Finding Dulcinea (a great name for a website) has this guide to Halloween.

This Year's Ignobel Prizes

The Annals of Improbable Research has hosted and given out the Ig Nobel Prizes once again. Among the winners this year: Dan Ariely, of MIT and Duke University, author of Predictably Irrational, for his work in showing that "high-priced fake medicine" is more efficacious than fake medicine that you don't pay as much for. The Chronicle of Higher Education has more coverage and a link to the festivities.

Now, has anyone studied the effects of receiving government grant money on the likelihood of being awarded an Ig Nobel Prize? Just kidding.

Law and Magic Cartoon

Amusing Bizarro law and magic-themed cartoon here.

[Thanks to Ken Trombly for the cite].

IP Norms In Comedy

Following up on previous discussions of the regulation of theft in magic tricks and other areas, such as fashion and cuisine, we now see this interesting discussion applied to the emergence of IP norms to regulate the theft of comedy routines. Dotan Oliar and Chris Sprigman, University of Virginia, School of Law, are publishing  "The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms in Stand-Up Comedy," forthcoming in the Virginia Law Review. 

In this paper, we analyze how stand-up comedians protect their jokes using a system of social norms. Intellectual property law has never protected comedians against theft. Initially, jokes were effectively in the public domain, and comedians invested little in creating new ones. In the last half century, however, comedians have developed a norms-based IP system. This system serves as a stand-in for formal law, and regulates authorship, ownership, transfer, and the imposition of sanctions on norms violators. Under the norms system, the level of investment in original material has increased substantially. We detail these norms, which often diverge from copyright law's defaults. Our description is based on interviews with comedians, snippets of which we include throughout the paper.

Our study has implications for intellectual property theory and policy. First, it suggests that the rules governing a particular creative practice affect not only how much material is created, but also the content of the work produced. Second, we suggest that the norms-based intellectual property system emerged over the past half century as technological change increased the benefit of having property rights in jokes and concomitantly reduced the costs of enforcing those rights. Third, we note that stand-up's norms system recognizes only a limited set of forms of ownership and transfer. We suggest that the system's crude rights structure is driven by the fact that effective enforcement requires that ownership be clear to the community.

We acknowledge that stand-up's norms system presents both benefits and costs, which we detail in the paper. However, norms-based intellectual property systems offer an alternative cost/benefit bundle which in some cases may be superior to that of formal law. One attractive feature of IP-related social norms is that they offer a way to regulate creative practices that do not sit well within IP law's one-size-fits-all mold. They do so, moreover, without imposing on society the costs of disuniformity in the formal law, including legal complexity and industry-driven lobbying. In stand-up's case, the social norms system economizes on enforcement costs and appears to maintain a healthy level of incentives to create alongside a greater diversity in the kinds of humor produced. A final assessment of stand-up's social norms system awaits further work. With what we currently know, we are cautiously optimistic.

Download the paper from SSRN here. See also Larry Getlen, Take the Funny and Run.

Recall that NPR had a segment on this subject not so long ago. Interesting stuff, especially for comedy magicians.

On the protection of design in fashion, see for example the following:

Kai Raustiala and Chris Sprigman, "The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design."

and 

Randal C. Picker, "Of Pirates and Puffy Shirts: A Comment on the Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design."

 

On recipes, see

 

Christopher J. Buccafusco, "On the Legal Consequences of Sauces: Should Thomas Keller's Recipes Be Per Se Copyrightable?"

 

 

A Frolic and Detour

This post has absolutely nothing to do with law and magic. But--my sister sent me a link to this video and I thought it was extremely funny. It's "An Engineer's Guide to Cats".  It ranks with the print introduction to solar energy by Jim Augustyn, The Solar Cat Book (updated as The Return of the Solar Cat Book) in terms of science humor. Check out the website devoted to cat and other non-primate art for similar "performance art" humor. (At least, I think MONPA is is supposed to be funny). For more fun with scientists, check out the current CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory (Mondays at 8, 7 Central Time. Now, back to our regularly scheduled program....