{"id":184,"date":"2003-06-08T23:25:39","date_gmt":"2003-06-09T03:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/fools_rush_in"},"modified":"2003-06-08T23:25:39","modified_gmt":"2003-06-09T03:25:39","slug":"fools_rush_in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2003\/06\/fools_rush_in.html","title":{"rendered":"Fools Rush In"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Vincent Gallo<\/a>: “If a fat pig like Roger Ebert doesn’t like my movie, then I’m sorry for him.”<\/p>\n

Roger Ebert<\/a>: “It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of ‘The Brown Bunny.'”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That Roger Ebert, he’s growing positively Churchillian in his old age.<\/p>\n

So last Tuesday Lawrence Lessig<\/a> sent me an email asking me and most everyone else in his address book to sign the “Reclaim the Public Domain<\/a>” petition.1<\/a><\/sup> Now, ordinarily I’m dubious about online petitions. Take the recent media deregulation debacle: the FCC received on the order of twenty comments for and 200,000 comments against, and Michael Powell went ahead and did it anyway. Hey, who knows — maybe each pro-deregulation comment was on average 10,000 times more persuasive than its anti-deregulation counterpart. If the bulk of the anti-deregulation comments came from where I think they came from<\/a>, that ratio wouldn’t be surprising.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the “Reclaim the Public Domain” campaign is<\/em> a good idea, and it does<\/em> come from one of my personal heroes, and it was<\/em>, as Lessig pointed out, his birthday. So how could I say no? More to the point, how could anyone<\/em> say no? Unless you think the proposed statute doesn’t go far enough<\/a>. Otherwise, if you want perpetual copyright protection over your work, is paying one dollar<\/em> after the first fifty years too much to ask? (It appears that hordes of well-heeled2<\/a><\/sup> lobbyists are already answering, “Yes.”)<\/p>\n

This is the kind of thing that just makes me want to rush off to law school, damnit<\/em>. The problem is that maybe I could get involved in some activism as a student, but by the time I graduate it will be the year 2008. At the rate things are going, by then the battle will be over and I’ll just be another debt-ridden young IP lawyer trying to get a job. I imagine it’s rather hard to convince a company that you’ll fight tooth-and-nail to protect their intellectual property when deep down you don’t think fighting tooth-and-nail is always<\/em> the ethical thing to do. Now is intellectual property a good thing? Absolutely. My mother is an author<\/a>; my dad’s company makes innovative cancer treatment machines<\/a>. Their livelihood depends on protection for their intellectual property. But do I believe in intellectual property über alles? Hell, no.<\/p>\n

I suppose all lawyers struggle with this issue: how to best serve your client while adhering to your own personal ethics.3<\/a><\/sup> Obviously there’s no magic formula, but it seems that most lawyers can find a niche if they look hard enough. Some lawyers want to be public defenders. Others want to be prosecutors for the state of Texas. There’s something for everybody.<\/p>\n

I’m just wondering if the choices are a little more limited for IP lawyers. How many openings does the EFF<\/a> have<\/em>, anyway?<\/p>\n

<\/a>1. I should point out that “Lawrence Lessig sent me an email…” might give you the false impression that we, like, hang out and drink beer and stuff. No, no. The reason I meandered my way into his address book is because I recently asked him a couple of questions over email about law school, to which he graciously responded.<\/small><\/p>\n

<\/a>2. Is there any other kind of lobbyist?<\/small><\/p>\n

<\/a>3. Presuming you have some.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the kind of thing that just makes me want to rush off to law school, damnit<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}