Magic and the Law

Can magicians keep others from replicating a trick or illusion that they've developed?  Or keep others from divulging the secrets behind the illusion that make it marketable? 

Magicians have an uneasy relationship with Intellectual Property Law. Copyright Law can protect written scripts, stage directions, and recordings of a performance, but not the process or method of the illusion itself.  To patent a process is possible, but the magician would have to furnish a detailed explanation of how the illusion is done, thus destroying the "magic."  Magicians need to protect their secrets from the public, but not necessarily from each other.  It's a widespread practice to share tricks of the trade with other master magicians and publish methodology in  magicians' journals.  Once information is shared within an industry, Trade Secret Law no longer applies.

These questions and more are addressed in a paper by Yale Law School's Jacob Loshin: "Secrets Revealed: How Magicians Protect Intellectual Property  Without Law."   This interesting and entertaining article will eventually be published in the upcoming Law and Magic: A Collection of Essays (Carolina Academic Press, 2008).  In the meantime, to make a working draft appear, click on this link and whisper  "Abracadabra..."

Posted by Patricia Bingham-Harper