Appreciating Our Professors: Larry Lessig

I’m never any good at these questions. I’m always stumped whenever I’m asked, “Who is your hero?” Similarly, although I enjoyed many of my classes, I don’t recall too many “ah-ha” moments in law school that didn’t come from reading a book or an article. For whatever reason, I’m more inspired by ideas than people.

And the idea that I picked up in law school that inspired me more than any other was the idea that law is part of a broader web of human culture, that it both influences other aspects of that culture and is influenced by it. I encountered (at least) two professors at Yale who were grappling with this concept, Bob Ellickson and Larry Lessig. Well, Lessig was only a visitor during the spring semester of my first year. On the other hand, I never took a class with Ellickson, and I’m not sure I’ve even ever met him. I know Ellickson primarily through his classic, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes.

So Lessig it is.

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How the Turkey Got Its Name

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! As you work your way through the (somewhat mythical) tryptophans, here’s a nugget to chew from the History News Network: Why Is Our Thanksgiving Bird Called a Turkey? (Answer: Because, of course, it came from Turkey). A taste (it’s wafer thin!):

But if the turkey is as American as motherhood and apple pie, why for god’s sake is the name of this bird the same as the name of a vast and important country in the Middle East? Not just any country, mind you. Turkey — the proud nation we know today — was the seat of the Ottoman Empire, the largest and most powerful political realm the western world has known since the decline and fall of Rome . . . .

How the American bird we know as turkey got the moniker “turkey” and not huexoloti (Aztec) or guajolote (Mexican) — authentic early American names for American turkeys — has much to do with the fact that Turkey was the center of the world at the time Christian Europeans began taking a few baby steps toward finding an alternative route to India . . . .

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Copyrighted Works Must Be Novel and Nonobvious

To anyone who knows IP law, the title of this post looks like either ignorance or craziness. I assure you, it’s not ignorance. Everyone knows that one of the distinguishing features between copyrights and patents is that patents require novelty and nonobviousness, and copyrights don’t. All you need to get a copyright is to have an “original” work of authorship — and “originality” is an extremely low threshold. It doesn’t require that the content be new, and it certainly doesn’t require that it be nonobvious; it only requires that it be yours (that is, “original” to you).

That’s the theory, but I don’t think that’s the practice. I was struck by this thought (ow!) over the weekend as I was reading materials on substantial similarity and the idea-expression distinction. (Perhaps this thought occurs to all copyright lawyers at some point; maybe it’s just my week.) There are certain famous passages that get intoned by copyright scholars and practitioners to explain such concepts, a bit like the missal in a Catholic mass. Originality is sometimes explained with this reading from the book of Learned Hand:

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