Thank god I can ridicule Glenn Beck and Chiropractors.

I think it’s sad anyone can take seriously a Glenn Beck legal claim based on the allegedly defamatory nature of a domain named “glennbeckraped andmurdered- ayounggilrl.com,” but I’m grateful at least for a First Amendment that, I believe, makes it very unlikely any such claim by Beck would prevail and that allows me to title a blog post “I don’t think Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl, but why won’t he deny it?”

I could, after all, live in England, where, as Olivia Judson writes,

Several times this summer, science journalists in London have leaned over to me and said something along the lines of, “I was thinking of writing,” and gone on to describe an article that was going to be critical of someone. “But then,” the speaker would gloomily conclude, “I thought to myself, ‘Simon Singh,’ and I decided not to.”

In England, as the Guardian explains, not only will the legal costs of defending a libel action will be considerable, often running into hundreds of thousands of pounds,” but, unlike in the States, “the loser almost always has to pay the costs of the winner, plus any damages awarded to the claimant.” As Judson points out, in England not only do “[l]ibel cases cost little to bring — you can make a no-win-no-fee arrangement with your lawyer” — but, most importantly, the defendant has the burden of proving the allegedly defamatory statement is true. In contrast, in the States, a public figure must prove the defamatory statement not only was false but was made with a reckless disregard for the truth. And even a non-public figure has the burden of proving the falsity of the allegedly defamatory statement.

Why is Simon Singh the person potential critics of bad science are reluctant to become? Because Singh is being sued by the British Chirpractic Association for libel after he wrote the following:

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

At least in this country we can hear presentations like the following:

Conventional chiropractic [medicine] is a confused pseudoscience that attracts non-discerning customers and students just as surely do supermarket tabloids, astrologers, palm readers and psychics. Don Paulin, who directs the Victims of Chiropractic outreach and is a member of the National Council Against Health Fraud, will examine the status of chiropractic and illustrate his talk with videos.

You can feel the way you want to about chiropractors, but I’ve never seen any evidence that satisfies me its benefits are anything other than the result of a placebo effect, and I’m glad I can say so without any great fear of being hauled into a court on charges of libel. Though, as the Guardian article linked to above suggests, since my posts can be read anywhere, I suppose there’s some risk I could be sued by chiropractors in England.

Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity

The loss of an important voice: William Patry, Copyright Maven

I am saddened to report that William Patry has, after 4 years, ended his Patry Copyright Blog.  There are several reasons for my sadness.  First, Mr. Patry is a wonderful writer, a creative thinker, and one of the leading authorities, if not the leading one, in the field of copyright.  His multi-volume treatise, Patry on Copyright, has instantly become the authority in the field, not only because of his expertise, but also because it is the first comprehensive treatise on copyright in 17 years.  And no one needs to be told that the last 17 years constitute an entire epoch in copyright law.

I am also saddened because Mr. Patry is a remarkably generous soul.  When, last February, I started a blog on copyright and fair use as a class project, I took a shot in the dark and wrote him to ask what he thought of the project.  I never expected to hear from him.  After all, he is Senior Copyright Counsel to Google.  I am way out of his league on the topics I planned to cover in the new blog.  Quite plainly, too, he is a very busy man. 

 Within minutes, however, he wrote me back, praising the project and welcoming my questions.  I tried not to abuse the invitation, but I did on several occasions write him and ask him for his reactions to things I wrote.  He was without exception gracious, generous, and, most wonderful of all, endlessly encouraging to me.  As he wrote, it is our human obligation to learn every single day.  He added that, in his 26 years of working in the field, there wasn’t a day he wasn’t amazed at how much more he had to learn.

That Mr. Patry also plugged my blog on his was just icing on the cake and instantly gave me credibility and attention I could never otherwise have expected.

It is a shame that Mr. Patry became viewed by some as a shill for Google.  He had a long and illustrious career in copyright long before joining Google and he made clear that the views he expressed on his blog were his own, not his employers.  Unfortunately, as he wrote in his last post:

There is nothing I can do to stop this false implication that I am speaking on Google’s behalf. And that’s just those who do so because they are lazy. Others, for partisan purposes, insist on on misdescribing the blog as a Google blog, or in one case involving a think tank, darkly indicating also a la Senator Joe McCarthy, that in addition to funding from Google, there may be other sources of funding too.

Saddest of all, Mr. Patry is in despair of the state of copyright law, which, in his view (as well as mine) has lost its purpose: to encourage and promote creativity.  He concludes his farewell as follows:

I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries.  I accept that the level of proper doses will
vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view . . . we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better.

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

If Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) didn't still own the copyright to Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney (the artist, not the company) would never have had the incentive to create him, right?