I don’t think so, since the Pit is the place for complaints or discussions about the board itself, and the other thread that was started in the Pit has been perfectly civil so far.
Copyright law does not protect an idea; only a particular expression of that idea. Further, “[m]agic tricks are functional, not protected by copyright.” Intellectual Property Law: Commercial Creative and Industrial Property § 5.01. As such, while it would be a violation to verbatim reprint materials in a magic book, it is not a violation to discuss those materials.
Whether or not it is ethical to divulge a magician’s secrets is a separate discussion, and thus copyright should not be a consideration when determining whether to censor such discussions.
It’s fun to be fooled,
It’s more fun to know!
Please excuse me if I repeat points made by others. At some point I was only skimming replies. My concern is not the OP, but the future of the well-being of the Chicago Reader, The SDMB, and the academic enterprise that I know Cecil and Ed value highly. These are not to be taken for granted.
A magician is NOT someone who knows how to do a trick. They are PERFORMERS whose livelihood depends on their ability to do trick, convincingly and well, with an entertaining patter and milieu. It’s the magician’s reponsibility to make their tricks non-evident: if he has plainly visible wires or bad equipment, s/he can’t cry “trade secret!” and demand a living.Any genuine lover of prestidigitation knows enough to make educated guesses on how almostever trick they see is done, yet it doesn’t dampen their enjoyment. Bottom line: we KNOW it’s not magic; we’re paying to see how well they can make it look like it is.
There are those who genuinely need to hide the fact that they are performing a trick,not “magic”. IMHO, they deserve the attention of police fraud departments.
Are phony spiritualists, mediums, multilevel marketing schemes and other borderline confidence scams off limits now? How about sellers of “mass marketing e-mail secrets”? May I no longer explain no-downpayment real estate buying on this board? How about “government freebies”? All are some person’s livelhood. All are often marketed as legitimately copyrighted texts and videos. Are we no longer allowed to discuss and analyze, from our own personal knowledge, corporate scandals, because the truth is contained in “secret” corporate memos?
How about the sex lives [or corporate accounts] of televangelists? (not copyrighted, but nonetheless: does the Chicago Reader aseert that it is unethical to reveal it, with so many millions in livelihood at stake?) There entire industries built on “secret information”, where widespread knowledge would bne would be far more likely to directly oppose their livelihood than revealing a magic trick. I can name quite a few successful business ventures that would have failed in their early years if people knew the truth about what they were investing in or buying. Can we no longer speak such truths?
We can’t, of course, reprint excerpts of copyrighted works, but if we can’t even direct people to copyrighted information, we better close up shop. The OED, major encyclopedias, almanacs and other reference works are all copyrighted. Ed Zotti would be reduced to phone interviews. The profession of reference librarian would be shaky indeed
IANAL, but I feel I should correct one point made earlier regarding US intellectual property laws: AFAIK, trade secrets are afforded afforded almost no protection by the government by virtue of being secrets. It is the duty of the holder of the secret to protect it. NDAs and other agreements with employees and outside associates may entitle them to sue, but those agreements are not binding on me. If I figure out the secret recipe for Coke or KFC, I have every right to market my own chicken or cola.
I don’t have the right to literally steal them (or cause them to be stolen) or -and this is the one sticky point, necessarily say that these are the actual recipes for a trademarked brand or otherwise attribute it in a manner that violates trademark law.
BTW, many states have instituted their own trade secret laws (e.g. Arizona’s 1990 Uniform Trade Secrets Act, A.R.S. 44-401 et seq.,) precisely because Federal protections against third parties are so weak. Again, IANAL, but allow me to suggest that the Chicago Reader’s current stand may hinder certain defenses it might wish to make against some future trade secret holder under some future law in, say, Utah or Rhode Island I love you guysd, so please discuss that possibility with your counsel, okay? There are excellent reasons why ISPs and so many BBSs have a deliberate laissez faire policy unless contacted by a rightsholder and informed of a specific infringement. It protects them.
Did you know that not just successes, but failures have been ruled trade secrets? It’s one thing for your competition to steal information that prevents them from repeating your mistake, but quite another to keep your investors from knowing where that $1.2B really went, or hype a technology as promising (which has debatable meaning anyway) while courting a company buyout or government bailout (esp. the latter: the gov’t didn’t demant to see Chrysler’s future/failed designs, a corporate buyer would)
Trademarks are more important than any putative trade secret. People go to see David Copperfield, whether he’s genuinely good or not, because he has a reputation. Coke and KFC don’t even have any obligation to adhere to their original secret recipes [Coke has admitted that it no longer does] yet they prosper on the basis of their trademarked brand. Many proprietary encryption techniques were actually terribly insecure, and until the DMCA, it was not illegal to ‘break’ them to prove their weakness, in order to HELP the public, and prevent customers from being cheated by dishonest marketing and deeply damaged by shoddy encryption/security.
I can agree that specific discussions of specific tricks as performed by certain performers may be a problem. If nothing else, casual assertions about the way a trick is done might be (again IANAL) potenitally libelous. Not many of us are speaking from a sufficient basis of demonstrable specific knowledge to qualify as a “defense on the basis of truth”. However, I hope the argument/policy being made has been run by legal counsel before being posted. It could be bad precedent.
As a slight hijack of this post, I note that you cannot copyright a recipe. For example, if a person took a recipe out of a book, and rewrote it in his own words while using the same ingredients, it won’t violate a copyright. Cite. Since a recipe is somewhat similar to a magic trick, couldn’t you write the trick in your own words and not violate copyright?
The case before the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was brought by Robert E. Rice, who sued the Fox Network and the masked magician involved in the series of Fox specials.
Mr. Rice claimed that by virtue of the fact that he had made and sold a video tape in 1986 entitled “The Mystery Magician,” where a masked figure showed how famous magic tricks worked, that he had copyright and that copyright had been infringed upon.
Whether the tricks could be revealed or not was NOT AN ISSUE IN THE CASE; Mr. Rice felt that he had exclusive right to the masked magician figure and thus he had been harmed for Fox and their masked magician.
So this is not a valid cite for your argument.
your humble TubaDiva
Absolutely incorrect. One cannot receive, what would in effect be, a patent for an idea expressed in a book. If I were to come up with a new accounting procedure and published that procedure in a book, the copyright on the book in no way whatsoever extends to me any protection of that procedure. In fact, the courts have explicitly ruled on this scenario and found as such.*
Moreover, from What Does Copyright Protect? (FAQ) | U.S. Copyright Office
*I’m in class right now so I can’t cite the case at the moment, but I will be happy to do so when I return home.
Oops. You’re right. I misunderstood the issues of the case as described in my cite.
But wouldn’t you say that Jayrot’s cites of 20+ previous discussions of magic tricks on the SDMB, plus the several articles by the Master himself, all of which have presumably not resulted in any lawsuits, make moot the question of whether the OP, or my link, or Trigonal Planar’s description, were problematic in any way?
Your humble commasense.
This is a legal discussion, so lets look at the actual statute!
Do legal statutes come any clearer then that?
I am now home and I return to discuss the aforementioned copyright case.
Baker v. Seldon, 101 U.S. 99 (1879).
In Baker, the court was asked to decide whether a book that described a book-keeping process that was copyrighted would extend protection to the process itself. Specifically, the court stated the question was “whether the exclusive property in a system of book-keeping can be claimed, under the law of copyright, by means of a book in which that system is explained?” The Court noted that there was a “clear distinction between the book, as such, and the art which is intended to illustrate” and that “no one would give the exclusive right to the art of manufacture described therein. … That is the province of letters-patent, not of copyright. The claim to an invention or discovery of an art … must be subjected to the examination of the Patent Office before an exclusive right therein can be obtained; and it can only be secured by a patent from the government.” Finally, and most importantly, the Court held that while “no one has the right to print or republish his book, or any materials thereof, as a book intended to convery instruction in the art, any person may practice and use the art itself which he has described and illustrated therein.”
His instructions are copyrighted. They cannot be reproduced here. But the information on how the trick is done - that is not copyrighted and cannot be. It is a *huge * distinction. Words are copyrighted. Ideas are patented. In software, some algorithms are patented - you have to license them to use them, (I’m talking about the LZH compression algorithm - the patent is about to expire or maybe has done so, I can’t remember) but telling me how to do it is legal and free. See Introduction to Data Compression for an example. A copyright extends to words. A patent extends to ideas.
It would be like trying to copyright how to change a flat tire. I can write an instruction manual and copyright that - you may not reproduce it - but you *can * tell me how to change a tire - how to do something is not copyrighted.
Its not breaking the law. And sharing information and knowledge is the same thing. Give me a break.
Yes, it is always legal, unless of course you sign a contract like Copperfield’s staff. If I film a movie in the streets of New York, I can have the cast sign a cotract saying that they can not tell anyone what happens in the movie. However, any bystanders in the street are free to tell the world what they saw. Warning to straightdope members: If you signed a contract with a magician not to give away secrets, please do not tell how magic tricks are done on these message boards.
Bullshit! The William Pounstone books are a prime example. David Copperfield can not sue Poundstone for giving away the tricks. If I come up with a completely original and never thought of way to do bicep curls and write a book about it, I can’t stop anyone who has read the book for sharing my “trick” with his friends. How to perform a magic trick with a couple of rubber bands is no different.
And I can copyright a book on how to take a bath. If anyone wants to share my “secrets” on taking a bath with anyone it is 100% legal.
Actually, I think it perfectly demonstrates a grasp of the issues involved here. It is legal to tell everyone how a trick is done because I either saw something I wasn’t supposed to or figured it out or read the directions in a book. It is perfectly allowable by law to tell anyone I want how to do it whether its by mouth or on a message board.
This thread isn’t about flaming, complaining, or discussing administration of the SDMB. Its about getting a factual answer to whether or not sharing how a magic trick is done with others is legal. This really doesn’t belong here.
Yes, the dudes who work with David Copperfield have signed a contract with him - no one on this board has. :dubious: :rolleyes: Big Secrets published several big tricks- and have not been successfully sued. The Masked Magician showed “how they did it” on TV- and again escaped prosecution.
The SDMB is here to expose the Truth, not cover up some prestidigitators ‘secrets’- which secrets are mostly well known to anyone who wants to pursue them.
So I ask for a Cite- show me a case where a “trick” (not the way it was done, not the hoopla around it- but the bare mechanics) was held up in Court- all the way through Appeals & everything. Show me a “citable” decision. I don’t think you can- I don’t think any Court has ever issued one (this doesn’t mean that some cases haven’t been settled out of court- I am asking for a Court citation like “Smith vs Jones, US 9th Circuit.”) Since I know how to research Court cases, I am moderately sure there isn’t one (and other have posted some pretty good Cites that show there are no such rights). And you know what that means? There are no such rights .
Cecil has shown “how they did it” himself. The Master.
Tuba- this guy is “filling your ears with wisdom.” Please reverse your decision.
Can anyone tell me how Three Card Monte works? Or is that “Intellectual Property”, too? :dubious:
My son years ago was interested in close-up magic and lots of books on the subject. One was a lovely illustrated Britisk paperback with lots of photos and diagrams that made it easier to learn the tricks. I used to flick through it and learn tricks I could “casually” do at work to dazzle folks - picking up a piece of rope and knotting it one handed, putting a banknote through a shredder and reconstituting it, and various card tricks.
I did notice reading the book that the author would often credit the “inventor” of a new trick or variant with a little blurb like “this clevere setup was devised by so and so” Other tricks were discussed in a way that made it obvious that real magicians knew whose trick it was.
It seems to be that TubaDiva is saying that the cost of defending against one lawsuit, however groundless, would be enough to shut the SDMB down for good. If I am wrong on this, then I welcome correction.
If this is the case, then all of the noble platitudes about the fight against ignorance are moot. The SDMB is a bandwidth-consuming message board run on a meager budget and presumably does not have the money or the interest in defending itself against frivolous lawsuits in the name of the glorious Fight Against Ignorance™.
There are lawyers on these boards. Presumably, there are some from the Chicago area. Are any of you willing to represent the Chicago Reader, pro bono, when lanzin or Abb Dickinson or whoever sues? Would this even be permissilbe (corporate charity and all that)?
And before anyone concludes that I’m taking lanzin’s side - no, I’m not. I think the only reason there’s such a kerfuffle about the rubber band trick, and not any of the tricks mentioned in Jayrot’s post, is that lanzin actually performs the rubber band trick and is afraid of his secret getting out. Of course, I could be wrong on that point, too.
Yes, but someone would actually have to find a lawyer willing to sue, and, given that there is absolutely nothing illegal about explaining a magic trick (in your own words), and that the law unambiguously and explicitly states that copyrights do not protect procedures or methods, I think they’d have a hard time even bringing this to court.
There’s different variants of it. The way I’ve done it and have seen it, it’s a simple sleight. It’s a bit hard to describe in words, but basically, when the three cards are thrown down, the “target” card is switched with one of the loser cards, so you’re following the wrong card from the get-go.
The trick is invariably set up by being played straight, i.e. the target card not being switched, to lure the better into a false sense of confidence.
There’s other ways of doing it, but this seems to be the classic method.
Well, I gotta say…if, as Jayrot points out, Cecil Adams has revealed specific tricks before in his columns, I think the Reader should know that precedent, at least, would indicate that it wouldn’t be sued. Unless, of course, ianzin, Dickson, and/or Ammar will now specifically sue on this issue, just to make a point.
I find it very telling that apparently, as pointed out by a couple of posters, the trick to which we’re all referring wasn’t even invented by Ammar. If that’s the case, and if multiple authors out there describe how the trick works in their own way - and if, in relating how the trick is done, a poster kept to their own words instead of copying chunks of text - then I really don’t see how there’s any viable IP claim at all. But then, while I am a lawyer, I only know the rudiments of intellectual property. Seems pretty clear cut to me, though.