Jay Leno, NBC studios, Rita Rudner and some other well-known comics have sued Judy Brown over her compilation joke books. Judy is well-known in the comedy scene as a teacher, but more as the writer of these books. She often posts to lists I’m on asking for jokes. She offers credit in the books when she does this and the chance to be then able to promote yourself in your bio as “published in ” Joke Soup or whateer book it is she’s writing. This also means you can say “xx ‘s work has appeared in blah blah book alongside Dave Chappelle, Ellen DeGeneres, Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce…” etc you get the point.

When I walked into an Urban Outfitters in Santa Barbara and saw her latest book I thought “why didn’t I get my stuff into her? I could have been in this book.”

This idea of advancing yourself by association is a whole other blog post. Living in a Google world is actually making this more important to many people as it’s how you are found. It’s something that start-ups do, bankers, lawyers, academics and comedians do it too.

Judy asks and credits somewhat-known, lesser-known and unknown comics for submissions and credits them. I never knew how shw got the rest of her stuff. Leno’s suit claims she and others on her behalf go to clubs and crib their material without letting them know or getting permission. And she’s not paying anyone for their jokes.

I’m seeing mixed reaction on comedy listservs I’m on.

I’ve spent enough time around open source ideas and Cory Doctorow and friends that I generally like the life philosophy of giving and being open to have your stuff be out there. I’m far enough away from law school that my brain has thankfully forgotten all the details of the compilation law suits over the phone book and every detail of fair use exemptions to copyright (which allow for the free use of small elements of copyrighted stuff for things like journalistic and academic purposes).

There’s:

1) the law as we have it now,
2) our ideas of how we want it to be, and
3) the practical realities of our lived lives that don’t really care much about the law

There’s a generally understood “code” among comics that you don’t steal another comics material (an unwritten law of kinds). It’s enforced by the respect or lack thereof of other comics. The truth as people like Cory have been talking about in tech circles and is true in comic circles as well, is that it is your ability to keep producing the material and the alignment of the material with you that creates your value. So “give away your information” and then people will pay for the hard bound copy or the DVD or to see you live. You’ll gain fans.

The practical reality of that for comics is a little tougher than coders. Any coder can get online and give their code away themselves. Comics haven’t been able to distribute themselves so easily, till the Net.

A joke, like a piece of code, can have a life of its own and get easily separated from its creator.
So is Judy brown just like a blogger? A curator of comedy? Someone who’s turning people on to comics? Is she any different than Myspace or Youtube if they decide to sell or license compilations of comedy submitted on their pages as “self-promotion” ?

I hate the feeling of being stingy. Of not sharing stuff. At the same time, comedy and perfoming have shown me that you get paid when you feel you deserve to get paid and make a decision not to do the work unless you get paid. You also need someone who wants your work, of course, but that emotional feeling of self-worth, that decision is at the crux of what turns someone who wants your work into a customer.

At a minimum, it seems like a choice the comics should get to make themselves. If Judy didn’t ask for permission from all the comics in the books, then I’m glad I wasn’t in them.

What else can comics learn from coders and vice versa? When do you get paid? How much do you “give away”? Is the law a pointless thing unless you have Jay Leno’s money anyway? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The US Supreme Court just handed down a decision that basically says that the President can’t do whatever he wants with the people held at Guantanamo. Technically a 5-3 decision, but Chief Justice Roberts would have voted on the side of unlimited Presidential powers if he could have.

You can see that these dudes long for the monarchy, the Pope or just daddy.  If only everyone else just understood, as they do that pleasing someone with more power is the safest way for us all to live we’d all be good boys just like them and everything would be ok.

Justice Stevens is 86, and there’s a big moment coming. How do you want to live America?

It’s not an either/or choice between strength through force and weakness through guilt.
 

Law School graduation: The Dean was glad to see me go. So was I.

First year associate jobs are apparently paying up to that much according to today’s New York Times. So now you can make almost as much in your first year as you’ve shelled out for law school. That is if you work at a very top big firm in a major city, and if you can live on air then you can take a good chunk out of your loans. The discussion on the NYT message board is instructive. In it you can see fear about whether or not you deserve that money, frustration, and concerns about being valued. I think that the increased pay is really a loss of consortium payment for all the sex and happiness those folks will miss out on. Law school is the most effective (but expensive) contraception known to mankind.

Much of the whole system is painful and I’d love to see the incredible brain power and passion of all the people who work in law focussed on asking “what would work better than what we have” rather than politely bitch-slapping each other for not working as hard as we do in a system that isn’t really meeting anyones needs well.

People at law firms are often very very focussed on how much they and their peers are making. They often have major law school debt. They work extremely hard. Could they ever earn enough to make it worthwhile?

Here’s a little piece of my own WayBack Machine. A journal entry…

May 16th, 2002. That’s today’s date. I want to remember it as the day I bought my freedom. Today was the day I paid off my student loans. For some reason, i don’t want to tell mum and dad.

The loan payments have made saving impossible. I have not bought a home. I have no real investments. I missed the stock market boom and all the investment growth during the Net years. I had nothing to work with. The fact of law school debt never bothered me. It was the fact that I was *still* paying for an experience I didn’t really want in the first place. All these years the payments have been a reminder of just how deep the cost is when you mortgage your soul. When you do what you think you ”should” what’s expected. I did law school cause I thought it would help me get taken care of, and instead I found it cost me. It cost me my freedom. I cost me my self.

Today I cut my last tie with law school. Today I am a free woman.

…so why is the legal world so uncomfortable? Why does this profession rank #1 in depression, and high in alcoholism and unhappiness? I believe there is something very wrong at the heart of the entire system. But there is no room in law school to ask why, only how. When you’re a law student, you’re too busy learning the system and playing the system for grades to do anything else. My next solo comedy is about law school. It’s called The Law Project and in it I teach the class I always wanted to take. I often do workshops with audience as I love the “open source” writing process, so sign up for my mailng list it you’d like to get the heads up on the show and workshop invites.

I grew up in Niagara Falls, Canada, the honeymoon capital of the world–now I live in San Francisco, the gay Jerusalem. While I spent my teenaged summers selling souvenirs to honeymooners, marriage wasn’t something I thought I could participate in directly, until last Friday.

The top Ontario court ruled that gay and lesbian couples must be allowed to marry. With this decision, Canada becomes the second country in the world to marry same-sex couples. I’ve lived in the United States for 14 years, and this news took me by surprise. America is the birthplace of the civil rights movement, after all; it?s where the push for gay and lesbian rights started. But somehow it’s legally flourished in Canada. This made me rethink the relationship between the countries.

Today people think lesbian and gay Americans have all kinds of rights, but that’s not actually the way it is. In most of the US, gay people can be fired or lose their housing through permissible discrimination. And we can’t serve honestly in the military or even legally have sex in many of the US states. The closest anything comes to marriage here is Vermont’s kind of “separate but equal” status for same-sex couples. But people see a lesbian wedding on Friends and think we all must be able to get married. If it’s on TV it must be real, right? After all we have Rosie, and Ellen, and Ikea ads aimed at us, we must be powerful.

And while gay people already can’t get married anywhere in the US, a democrat recently introduced a constitutional amendment to Congress just to make sure. But hey, we’re going to get a cable TV channel to call our own soon, so no worries. America was founded, originally, on property rights. And any capitalist or expressive aspect of being gay has made incredible headway.

America, ironically, has this great tradition of individual rights, which makes it’s neglect of gay legal rights at the national level all the more surprising. It’s got a culture that celebrates the individual and individual expression. It’s a place where you can kick up your heels a little.

Whenever I have visited Toronto, since moving to the States, I’ve felt like the gay people I see are less out — more closeted. But now I realize that it’s not because of their concern for their legal status. They’re just being Canadian. Understated.

Canada was founded on the idea of peace, order and good government rather than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Canadians are very proud of the value we place on tolerance. Everyone should be welcome and get along, just as long as you don’t kick up too much of a fuss. Standing out is not a real Canadian idea. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t the place where drag queens got fed up with police harassment in 1969, rioted, and started the gay rights movement. Canada doesn’t have the same strong history of civil disobedience as the US. But neither does it rely on the marketplace to take care of government or civic rights. So Canada has taken these ideas that individualistic Americans started and absorbed them into broad legal protections on a human rights basis.

The winning attorney cited a study that showed that last year over 65% of Canadians approved of marriage for gay and lesbian Canadians. She said that the decision shows that, “the law is keeping up with the culture.” But the culture in Canada has changed, in part, because of Stonewall, and ACT UP and Rosie and Will & Grace and the Ikea ads.

This historic decision leaves me confused. What does it mean to live in the United States? As a Canadian? As a lesbian? As someone who wants cultural freedom and legal protection. I love both countries. I choose to live here in the United States. But where will I honeymoon?

Paté & Joan were my law school salvation. I’ve never been sure if they are sassy chicks or righteous drag queens. One way or another, they find themselves, through a series of cruising and interior decorating accidents, enrolled in Law Skul…

I drew these each week to keep me from gnawing my right arm off, while I was stuck in the trap of Law Skul.

Cafe
What Do You Want to Do With Your Life?
Dean’s Office
Career Options
Cafe 2
Job Interview
The Question is Moot
Paté & Joan’s Interpretive Guide to Law Skul Propaganda
Faculty Selection
The Horror
Fun with Facilities
Rights Swopping
Wife Shopping
Faculty Meeting
Advice
April Fools
To do List
Dean-o-Rama
New Year’s Resolutions
La Finale

In this two-part downloadable article, I explain the different Internet content models from a copyright perspective, and analyze some of the implications for the future of the media/new media business. This piece was first published in the Silicon Alley Reporter, and then a revised version was published in Digital Mogul.

As with everything on this site, please email contact@subvert.com to request permission to license, reproduce or distribute.

Part 1 (pdf)

Part 2 (pdf)