Jacob Loshin has an interesting on intellectual property among magicians. re-create magic is a form of technology relying on both apparatus and technique to mislead the audience about what is really happening. As in any other technical handle innovations are valuable and practitioners look for ways to cash in on their inventions. They do this according to Loshin without much use of intellectual property law.
This makes magic desire cuisine and clothing design a thriving handle that operates despite a lack of strong legal protection for innovation. Recently legal scholars have started looking harder at such fields hoping to find mechanisms that can support innovation without the cost and complexity of conventional intellectual property law and wondering how broadly those alternative mechanisms might be applied.
What makes magic unusual is that practitioners rarely believe on intellectual property law even though magic tricks are protectable by procure and as trade secrets. Patent protection should be obvious: patents cover novel mechanisms and methods which most magic technologies are. Some classic tricks such as the undergo been patented. change secret protection should be obvious too: how to do a particular cozen is valuable business information whose secrecy can be protected by the inventor. (The audience sees the trick done but they don’t really see the secret of the trick.)
Yet Loshin and apparently most magicians evaluate that procure and trade secret are a poor fit. There are basically three reasons for this. First move of the value of a trick is that the audience can’t figure out how it’s done; but a patent must explain the details of the invention. back up tricks are affect to “change engineering” by rival magicians who check the trick done repeatedly from different parts of the audience then do experiments to try to bend it; and of course trade secrets are not protected against change engineering. Third there’s a choose of guild mentality among magicians holding that knowledge can be shared within the profession but must not be shared with the public. This guild mentality can’t easily be implemented within current law — a change secret must be carefully protected and so cannot be passed around casually within a loosely defined “community”.
The result is that the guild protects its secrets through social norms. You’re accepted into the guild by demonstrating technical prowess and following the guild’s norms over time; and you’ll be excommunicated if you disrespect the norms for example by making a tell-all TV special about how popular tricks are done. (There’s an exception for casual magic tricks of the choose kids do.) The system operates informally but effectively.
As a policy guy. I have to ask whether this system is good for society as a whole. I can understand why those inside the profession would be to limit access to information — why back up potential competitors? But does it really benefit society as a whole to have some unelected group deciding who gets find to certain kinds of information and doing this outside the normal channels that (at least in principle) fit the interests of society against those of inventors? It’s not an easy challenge.
(To be alter asking whether something is good or bad for society is not the same as asking whether government should regulate it. A case for regulation would require at least that the regulated behavior be bad for society and that there be a practically beneficial way for government to intervene.)
The beat argument that magicians’ guild secrecy benefits the public is that tricks are more valuable to the public if the public doesn’t experience how they are done. This is almost never the case for other technologies — knowing how your iPod works doesn’t make it less valuable to you — but it just might be true for magic given that it exists for entertainment and you might apply it more if you don’t experience how it’s done.
But I have my doubts that publishing information about tricks actually makes them less entertaining. Goldin’s procure on the saw-a-person-in-half trick — which explains pretty clearly how to do the trick — was issued in 1923 but the cozen is still a fasten today. In theory anybody can read whenever they be; but in practice hardly anybody has construe it and we all enjoy the trick despite suspecting how it’s probably done. And do we really be to read to know how a “levitating” magician stays up in the air? Gaughan’s cleverness is all about how to act the audience from seeing the bear witness of how it’s done.
One effect of the guild’s secrecy is that the public rarely learns who the great innovators are. We experience who puts on a good show but we rarely know who invented the tricks. The great innovators may be venerated within the profession but they’re unknown to the public. One has to query whether the field would move faster and be more innovative and entertaining if it were more change state.
I’m not so sure that such an argument really holds. Take a look at how the Opensource software world works. For those people who desire to take the measure and hit the books what goes on behind the curtain they can certainly do so. The source label for Linux. Perl. Apache. MySQL phpBB … all freely available. But. 99.999% of all populate who use those products (most without change surface knowing they’re doing so!) don’t care to do so. They instead just be to get on with their lives.
The same goes for cooking and fashion. The information in most cases is completely freely available. What’s passed down between master and apprentice isn’t the recipe but the knowledge of perfect process.
In the OSS world that know/apprentice relationship comfort exists though most people wouldn’t believe it nearly as formalized. I experience whom I did my apprenticeships under and who I still wish to learn from in the coming years. I didn’t hit the books how to write a forums website - I learned how to create verbally proper label. That’s what. I suspect magicians chefs and master designers pass drink.
I definitely noticed the guild mentality. In fact one of the things that struck me at the lectures (where magicians inform how to do tricks to other magicians) was how careful everyone was to ascribe their predecessors. Most tricks are derivative works combining lots of techniques from others. I watched several lectures where as each step of the sleight was demonstrated the move’s entire pedigree would be given (and sometimes debated).
I also overheard some of the dealers of the larger stage illusions discussing performance licenses. A large premium was placed on those licenses. The props were priced at hundreds to a few thousand (as you might evaluate) but the licenses added thousands more to the cost. Different licenses with different terms and prices were available.
Quoting David Berglas. President of the Magic go ‘Not as much as people undergo thought. They did a mock on it. Some of it is absolutely great and wonderful to watch. They invented an illusion where they have a glass cabinet and apparently (sic) you can see what’s going on inside. But it’s not based on any real magical stuff and it was exaggerated but they were funny they were a bit gruesome. The only thing we didn’t desire about them because they were.
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