Law school does about fifty different things to ones brain so that by the time a person graduates from law school they think in a completely different way than had prior to law school. One of these processes is the slow realization that everything in your life, whether you realize it or not, is somehow related to the law. That makes sense to a certain extent. We, as humans, created laws** to that society would run in an orderly fashion and hopefully people wouldn't kill each other over petty disagreements as much. What law school does is lift the veil on just how much of a person's life is controlled by the law. The classes you take your first year in law school are the ones that touch a normal persons life the most, property and contracts in particular. Again none of this is surprising. But for me, the area of law I love the most*** is an area I knew from the get go had a huge impact on a normal person's life. Copyright and patents and trademarks**** are constantly around us. The diet coke I can't drink anymore, the Starbucks bag I have in my pantry, the Poland Spring water bottle on my night table, the computer I'm typing on right now, the Zune I use to listen to my favorite music, the posters I have hanging on my walls, the fan I have running 24/7 because my land lady is crazy, the books on my shelf, and piles of DVDs I have under my desk. All of these things fall under either copyright, patent, or trademark. You can look around your life and catalog hundreds of different things that fall into one of those categories. While I find copyright the most interesting, none are more important than the other when it comes to a person's everyday existence. How we consume life, outside of contracts and property, are dictated by the laws of copyright, patents, and trademarks.
With the internet we as a society have to some extent started to take for granted a very basic truth. The area of intellectual property, for better or worse, was created to protect and make money for businesses and people. As I tend to focus on copyright I tend to focus on the idea that copyright enabled artists to make money from their creations without having to find patrons. But anything that can be categorized as intellectual property can be said to make money for someone. With the ease the internet gives us in communicating and sending information, I feel that we've forgotten that idea. Copyright has been around for such a long time that it's basic purpose has been forgotten and taken for granted, depending on who you talk to. Our system for dealing with copyright is clearly not adequate, but what I find so fascinating is that the loudest people in this debate either want to make copyright even more backwards thinking or seem to have a naive notion of what copyright is about. I've said this before and I'll say it again, what the copyright debate needs is a middle ground. SOPA and PIPA are wrong and will do more hurt than good. But so is giving up on copyright completely.
*This is a writing exercise with two purposes. 1) Get my brain in the right place to write a cover letter and 2) have something related to law as my top entry for any potential employers looking at this blog.
**And societal norms, which are kind of like unspoken laws.
***And the one thing I don't get to study until next year.
****Otherwise known as intellectual property.
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