Teller on theft in magic
esquire.com
esquire.com
But is that the same as a masterful magic trick? And if not, should we treat it the same?
I don't think it's the same thing at all. A master magician might easily spend years practicing a trick -- the right mechanics, the right theatricality, anticipating the audience response, coming up with some new illusion -- and then, as the article describes, if that trick is self-contained enough, someone else might see it and work out how it's done and then sell the same trick to people who haven't invested anywhere near as much effort in practicing it.
So I don't think that we can say, well, this is just like software, it's an idea, and therefore we shouldn't protect it. I think that the very idea behind IP laws in the first place was to protect effort -- to safeguard someone's livelihood if they spent years developing an idea, so that someone else wouldn't simply come along immediately afterward and usurp the idea and rob that person of all of the effort that they invested in developing it.
There's this huge difference in effort between writing simple functions in software and developing masterful magic tricks, and we should recognize that.
Nor do I think that Penn & Teller are at all guilty of hypocrisy. I think it's enough to have just seen some episodes of Fool Us to see that they can have huge amounts of respect for magicians who copy their tricks, so long as those magicians add something unique to it. That's all they ask: take what we do, and do it better.
I can not imagine defending the reverse engineering and subsequent sale of someone else's unique illusion under the umbrella that "software patents are bad".
I am somewhat more dismayed that the article seemed to present a good enough case for this all on its own, but the discussion so far is ignoring it -- almost as if everyone just skimmed it.
The idea from the point of view of the populus is to encourage innovation and open cultural expression. A corollary of that is the protection of livelihood of creators/inventors if that is required to support the general aims.
So are illusionists who're creating innovative cultural expressions of their art ceasing to create for want of funding and because others are following their lead? Or are such illusionists who create, model and use novel illusions able to generate a reasonable return for that good without additional IP protection and thus with the addition of such works entering the public domain at the earliest possible point.
[I concede I've not read the article yet (shock!) as it was blocked for me].
"Invention is all fuzzy, sloppy stuff," Steinmeyer says.
"I have patents, and I have had patents that have expired.
Everything has a limited lifetime. But when a person can't
make a living by coming up with new material, that's when
you have to wonder about the system. I would say that over
the last few years, the last ten years, it's a net zero.
I'm putting as much money into it as I'm getting out."Interesting, and particularly relevant to this discussion, is the fact that "Hiding the Elephant" spends a fair bit of time going over probably the single most famous theft of magic in history: when American magician Harry Kellar stole the British magician John Maskelyne's "The Entranced Fakir" levitating woman trick. Kellar bribed one of Maskelyne's stage magicians, Paul Valadon, to obtain the plans to the trick, and then used the stolen trick to establish himself as maybe the most famous American magician of the time. His entire career in magic had been founded on plagiarism.
No, this is know as a "sweat of the brow" interpretation and has been rejected by the US Supreme Court. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
Just because something takes effort does not mean it should be protected. Just because a person could make more money by having exclusivity does not mean that thing should be protected.
I haven't thought about the issue of magic tricks enough to know what I think about it, but I definitely resist the notion that something should be protected simply because it took work to create. That way leads to a society where everything is pay-per-view. For example, just because I scan an old book doesn't mean I should own a copyright on the scan.
Just to play devils advocate, why not? Wouldn't that result in many more old books being scanned that otherwise wouldn't be? Wouldn't competition force down the price of the popular old books?
I would gladly pay for a well-written IP-infringing new version of Matrix 2-3 instead of the official crap that the rights owners put out.
What I am not fine with is this idea that IP is protected for its own sake. We need to remember that it is a quid quo pro, and not merely a reward for entertainers.
> I am fine with the literary aspects of it being protected
> provided that the practical aspects are not
Then magic tricks can all be patented, and protected for the life of the patent. Interested amateurs can look up the patents, but magicians can rest assured that few in their audience will take that step. Seems like a perfect tradeoff to me.
The style couldn't be more different. The "effect" is the same, but the style is light years apart.
I don't believe you should be able to copyright an effect, and it's likely he's not even using the same effect.
I understand Teller wants to protect an idea he came up with, but I think it's protected simply by the grace and beauty of his version.
The general rule is you are to ask the individual you are copying if you can copy them in which case they will say no unless they sell the trick, or you can argue that you independently came up with the trick, and the person agrees with you.
Copying is always considered "theft" even with attribution unless there's specific permission.
There is a case where a performer does magic to the same song (Shape of my heart), but with different actual magic performance and it is considered copying.
*Edited to improve my tone, the person I responded to deserves good faith and seems quite reasonable.
I spent most of my life in the opensource and academic communities, where free sharing of techniques and knowledge was not only commonplace but encouraged.
It's very sad that much of the magic world is so anti-sharing and so jealously guard the knowledge they possess from each other (unless you can pony up their asking price).
This aspect of parts of the magic community is a huge turn off for me.
Much of the magic community is a huge turn off to me, but it's an enjoyable hobby that I have a lot of interest in.
Sort of like the way the BSD license works. However if credit is given and the new effect is sufficiently unique/innovative, then no objection is reasonably made.
In today's world, these age-old effects or gimmicks are popularized by various working magicians, some of whom make a name based on them. And once in a while a completely novel approach is invented.
Most new effects are the result of borrowing. A card trick may use a lift invented 100 years ago and a bit of verbal patter similar to something invented last year. The respectful magician will give credit where it's due and will still be respected if he has truly innovated.
If there is true innovation no magician will begrudge him the use of the borrowed elements, unless of course they make up the bulk of the trick.
The magician's creed is closely correlated with the steps needed to gain the respect of other magicians.
You're focusing heavily on borrowed elements from long ago. Sure.. No one cares. However take something from a current performer and it will not be respected.
I do agree that the magician's creed is very much about the steps needed to gain respect of other magicians.
Given how much Penn & Teller built their careers on exposing the tricks of other magicians who had guarded their secrets for decades (and getting a lot of stage magicians made at the duo), it's pretty ironic for Teller to now decide he wants government protection for a trick of his.
Disclaimer: esquire.com is not working for me right now so I haven't read the original article yet; I'm basing this on your comment.
They do a couple exposures. Cups and Balls, Blast off, and a new escape in their act that you can choose to cover your eyes for or not.
Cups and Balls and Blast Off aren't exactly carefully guarded secrets... what are you referring to?
They have a particularly gory version of sawing a woman in half for example. I think it is on youtube somewhere, pretty solid.
But yeah, I don't think you could say that they reveal tricks that "belong" to other magicians. They reveal the basic stuff.
— The article.
The Cups and Balls is a classic, and everybody knows, or can easily find out, how it's done. And then they take it and turn that on its head, by doing a routine around "we're going to show you exactly how the trick works, and still amaze you with it". Which is, well, magic.
And in general, a lot of their "exposures" follow that patten. They're much more about artistry and that kind of next-level thing where showing the "secret" doesn't detract from but in fact adds to the effect.
The problem here is that the chap was then SELLING the trick for thousands of dollars, that's where Teller started to have a problem with it.
Article version:
> Against a crimson curtain, Bakardy had erected an easel with what looked like a large pad of white paper on it. Perhaps six feet in front of the easel sat a small wood table bearing a glass Coke bottle filled with water. That bottle also contained a single rose. A spotlight, outside of the camera's view, cast the rose's shadow on the paper on the easel. Dressed in a dark suit, Bakardy appeared in the frame carrying a large knife in his right hand. He sliced it deep into the rose's shadow. And when he cut into its shadow, something impossible happened: The corresponding part of the rose fell off the stem and onto the table. Petal by petal, Bakardy cut at the rose's shadow until that Coke bottle somehow held only a decapitated stem, which he removed as though to demonstrate the absence of wires. He then lifted up the bottle itself — still no strings attached — and poured out the water. Ta-da.
It is not the same video, it is the same trick done with different patter, and feel. Sorry if that is not clear, I can tell by the reading the intention I was trying to convey was not the intention people got.
He reuploaded him doing the trick with different patter, not the same video.
The article specifically mentions treating a magic act as a performance and copyrighting it in a similar manner to a play - this video is a substantially different act to his. The video described in the article however is a straight rip-off.
Penn, on the other hand, would tell you he is going to lie about it, lie about it, then tell you he lied about it, and you still wouldn't be sure if he was lying about lying.
Penn has talked about this issue before on Penn Point as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlEBh_98lIo
Within the mainstream circuit there is much more of a culture of sharing material, so one can be of the opinion that joke theft is just something that happens on the mainstream circuit.
It doesn't majorly impact the victims on the alternative circuit because the audiences are different, and the concept of ownership of material within the alternative circuit is a lot stronger and so the people who matter will still attribute it to you.
I don't know enough about magic to know if there is or isn't a similar divide.
Perhaps magic tricks should have the same thing: an automatic license for "covers", where if you want to perform someone else's trick you pay a standardized, small fee to the original inventor.
So, if this is a hoax, it's a long time in the making (this page was last updated in November 2009).
It was worth the read just for that alone.
All of the techie people instead of deriding copyright would instead insult and attack anyone who used any code remotely similar making sure to not stay in the same company of someone who would dare write even a version of a sorting function.
Is scroll bounce magical, the way Teller's Shadow is? It is a lie, we all know that digital screens do not have bounces, and that's what surprises us and pleases us. What about slide to unlock?
Honestly, I'm torn by this. As much as I cherish things magical, I couldn't see how public interests would be served by giving these illusions exclusivity.
That said, you can't steal an idea. It's physically impossible. The original idea-haver still has it.
;)