Copyright Debate at The Economist
The Economist is hosting an online debate on copyright law and policy. The proposition at issue is this: “This house… Read More »Copyright Debate at The Economist
May 2009
A Right to be Punished?
[Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions]
From the Department of Paradoxes in Sporting Jurisprudence:
Last Saturday night, at the end of the NBA playoff basketball game between the Dallas Mavericks and the Denver Nuggets, Antoine Wright of the Mavericks broke the rules. He intentionally collided with Carmelo Anthony of the Nuggets, who had possession of the basketball, in a play that ordinarily would produce a whistle from the officiating crew and a stoppage in play. That was Wright’s objective. At the instruction of the Mavericks’ coach, he wanted to be called for a foul, so that play would be stopped and the Mavs would have a chance to regroup and capture the ball. (The Mavs had a foul to give at the time, which means that the victim, Anthony, would not have been entitled to shoot foul shots. Instead, the Mavs would have in-bounded the ball.)
As basketball fans know, the officiating crew did not whistle Wright for the foul. Anthony continued onward, shot the ball, and scored the winning basket for Denver.
After the game, the Mavericks were furious that the referees had not called Wright for the intentional foul, and the NBA officially confirmed that the crew on the court had erred.
That prompts this question: Is there a right to be punished? If so, when, and if so, why?
Read More »A Right to be Punished?“Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote”
From Yahoo News: When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he… Read More »“Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote”
The Law School Faculty as a Commons
[Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions]
What’s the connection between law professors and stand-up comics?
My last post pointed to a recent short piece on comics and the relationship between “anti-plagiarism” social norms that encourage comic creativity and the emergence of those norms in the context of commodified comedy. Comics sold and consumers bought LPs by the boat-load. The success of record albums had a clear if unmeasurable impact on comics’ incentives to produce and innovate.
A generalizable point is this: Record album sales are an objective and observable characteristic of this particular environment. The data is mostly external to the comics themselves. What scholars describe as social norms among comics are, by contrast, mostly subjective. Norms are personal to each comic. We “observe” the existence of social norms them by inferring their existence from regular behavior and from anecdotal reports. That interplay between observable, objective, and “external” dimensions of an innovation environment and subjective, “internal” dimensions of that environment is central to understanding its mechanics.
In fact, that interplay is probably central to understanding the mechanics of any cultural context. It’s’ a central theme in the work that I’ve begun on “cultural commons” with Brett Frischmann and Kathy Strandburg. And it connects stand-up comedy and law faculties. More below the fold.
Read More »The Law School Faculty as a Commons