LSAT 149 | Section 2 | Reading Comprehension: Q19

RC Question 19 Explanation

DISCUSSION: There’s no way to prephrase this, so you should just remember the main themes of each paragraph in passage A:

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. CORRECT. This follows from paragraphs 2 and 3 combined. Paragraph 2 asks how comedians can recoup the costs of their routines without copyright? Paragraph 3 provides the answer: social norms. And the final line of paragraph 3 says that thanks to social norms, comedians “have substantial incentives to invest in new material”.
2. The author didn’t talk about “shoulds”. Their argument was merely a factual description of the situation. But further, this opinion wouldn’t make sense for the author: they think copyright law isn’t cost effective for comedians (paragraph 1)! Further, social norms seem to be working well. So why should comedians change what they’re doing?
3. Paragraphs 2 and 3 together suggest that comedians are concerned with the cost of material. They developed a whole system of social norms to prevent comedians from stealing material from other comedians.
    
   In a world where cost is irrelevant, theft is also irrelevant. You don’t worry about someone stealing the air in your house when they breathe.
4. Not so. The author is only talking about comedy, where intellectual property law doesn’t work well. But there may be other fields where it does work well. In those fields the author might believe that the law is more effective than social norms.
5. The author never took a position on this. Their passage is merely descriptive: they describe why the law doesn’t work, and how social norms have replaced it. The author takes no stance on whether anything should be different.