LSAT 149, Section 2, RC Passage 3, Intellectual Property

Paragraph Summaries

Passage A

1. Copyright applies to jokes and comedy, and yet there are rarely lawsuits about joke stealing. Joke stealing itself is common. Copyright law is difficult and costly to apply to jokes.
2. Conventional legal wisdom says that without copyright, nobody will create. So why do comedians keep making jokes?
3. Comedians have social norms that substitute for copyright and serve the same purpose. Comedians who serve jokes are shunned and blacklisted, and their careers are hurt. So this informal system lets comedians own jokes.

Passage B

1. Chefs recipes can’t be copyrighted, and are rarely able to be patented. Chefs protect their recipes using social norms which work much like intellectual property law does in other areas. There are three key norms.
2. First norm: A chef must not copy another recipe exactly. This is like a patent. Second norm: If a chef shares info with a colleague, the colleague can’t pass it on without permission. This is like a trade secret. Third norm: you must credit chefs who developed significant recipes. This is like copyright.

Analysis

Both passages have the same theme: absent enforceable copyright in comedy and chefs, comedians and chefs have formed social norms that fulfill much the same purposes as intellectual property law does.

Note that comedians can copyright jokes, but it is hard to legally enforce. By contrast, chefs cannot copyright recipes. Yet both professions developed similar norms.

The author of passage A focusses on penalties comedians use to block people who break the rules. Whereas the author of passage B sticks to describing how the norms are meant to work, and how they parallel copyright law.

Most of the details you need to know are in the paragraph summaries I made above. If you’re unclear on any of it, you should reread the passage in conjunction with the summaries until it makes sense. I think this passage is more straightforward than the first two in this section though. You could even summarize the passages even shorter, like this:

1. Copyright law isn’t cost effective for comedians.
2. So why do they make new jokes?
3. Because they have social norms. These are enforced and work like copyright.

1. Chefs don’t have legal protections
2. So they use three key social norms to enforce intellectual property. These norms parallel property law.

Increasingly, RC passages are using vocabulary that few would know. In these cases, the LSAT is judging your ability to figure out meaning from context. Passage A includes the word “hortatory”. Even I didn’t know this word. But you can figure it out from context.

It says comedians social norms are “not merely hortatory”. Instead, these norms are enforced. So “merely hortatory” is the opposite of something enforced. So, you can figure that hortatory is something unenforced. (I checked the definition, it comes from exhort, which means you urge someone to do something, but merely urge it).

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