Tricks, Shtick and Intellectual Property

What can corporate counsel learn from magicians and stand-up comics? More than just tricks and shtick. In fact, these groups may offer a new way of dealing with intellectual property, argues Daniel L. Smith in Creative Vigilantes (free registration required). Smith looks at how efforts to protect intellectual property have expanded since the country was founded (copyright has, for instance, grown from 28 years to 90 or more), and then examines how groups that don't have good legal protections -- magicians, comics, chefs, hair-stylists -- manage to maintain innovation without them.

Smith examines a series of legal papers that show how these groups have been able to use shame, ridicule and ostracism as tools to protect their intellectual property. It may be that such methods won't work for the music industry (and at one point, musicians like J.S. Bach felt pride when they heard their own music 'borrowed' by other composers). But Smith makes the obvious point that innovation can happen without the force of law behind it.