The Scholar’s Space

Doug Lichtman, law professor at UCLA, is conducting interviews with legal scholars and practitioners on topics at the heart of today’s most important intellectual property cases. These interviews are freely available. The current podcast focuses on the Constitutionality of the damages claims, as raised by Charlie Nesson’s (Harvard Law School) defense of Joel Tanenbaum, one of the many accused of infringing music copyrights by virtue of his activity on a p2p network. It’s a snap to listen to one of the podcasts, or download it for later, and he offers CLE credit (Continuing Legal Education) for those lucky lawyers who practice in California, Texas, New York and a few other states, soon to be more. Because Doug’s is mostly a legal audience, he certainly does get down into the nitty-gritty of, some would say, esoteric legal fine points, but because these come up in the context of newsworthy intellectual property cases, the discussions will have a wider appeal. Check out the archive of past interviews. New ones are posted monthly.

Getting down into the nitty-gritty is the stuff of daily grind for attorneys, but that focus does suggest that questions of policy, direction and the broader perspective may get short shrift. Indeed, the Nesson-Tannenbaum-RIAA discussion does focus relentlessly on the details of the Constitutionality of statutory damage awards. Nesson seems to me to be motivated by policy concerns (as most of us are who think the current iteration of the copyright statute is way out of whack), but in court, that’s supposed to be the last thing you bring up, sort of like icing on the cake. The main ingredients have got to be strong legal case precedents, logical argumentation, and creative use of same applied to your facts. For CLE, focus on such details makes good sense. But it can seem a lot like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic to someone (me) who thinks that the whole copyright framework is it’s own worst enemy as those responsible for making our laws resist efforts to adapt copyright more meaningfully to the digital networked environment. But lawyers love to argue about fine points, even if the ship is going down. Who’s got time to notice?

But that’s just one interview. They may not all be only about fine points. I looked at upcoming events and one of two currently described for coming months is about several areas of creativity that thrive with weak forms of protection. Doug suggests there are lessons to be learned from these creative fields for the areas where copyright owners think there’s just no alternative to strong and long copyrights. Sort of policy-ish.

Anyway, worth a listen! And if you want the CLE, definitely worth a listen.