The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 39: A Rose By Any Other Name

Episode Date: January 24, 2017

Neat trick, but can you copyright it?

The ocean moves us. Surfing a wave or savoring the view. The ocean delights us as playful otters restore coastal kelpores. The ocean connects us. Visit Monterey Bay Aquarium.org slash connects. This is the way I heard it. It's one of the simplest but most devastating illusions of all time. It's called shadows.

And it works like this. A spotlight is trained on a vase containing a single rose. The light falls in such a manner that the shadow of the rose is projected onto a white screen positioned several yards behind it. The magician then enters the scene with a knife and without speaking, dramatically cuts off the petals from the rose's shadow. With each cut, the corresponding petals on the real rose magically fall to the ground. In other words, the illusionist trims a real rose by pruning. its shadow. The effect is stunning, and Raymond, the magician who created the now-famous illusion 40 years ago, was standing in a Nevada courtroom trying to pull off an even harder trick,

convincing a U.S. District Court judge that magic should be protected under U.S. copyright law. It all started a year earlier when Raymond stumbled across a video on YouTube that featured a magician from Belgium performing his illusion. Instead of shadows, the Dutchman called it Rose and her shadow. But any fool could see it was the exact same trick, a shameless rip-off pure and simple. Raymond knew that magician's secrets weren't legally protected, but this was just egregious. Not only was the Dutchman ripping him off artistically, he was offering to sell the secret over the internet to anyone who paid him $3,050. Raymond called the Dutchman personally.

He tried to reason with him. He invoked the magician's code and tried to appeal to his sense of honor. No luck. The Dutchman demanded payment in exchange for not selling Raymond's secret, and Raymond was willing to pay, but the price was just too high. And now the Dutchman had made a quiet but very serious enemy. For his friends and fans, Raymond's anger must have been a strange thing. to see. Unlike David Copperfield or Chris Angel or David Blaine, Raymond's brand of magic is neither

flashy nor flamboyant. He prefers to let his work speak for itself. But now, Ray was vocally outraged and determined to find a loophole in the law. What he found was this. While the secrets of illusions are not protectable under federal copyright, dramatic works and pantomimes are. Interesting. interesting. Raymond had always described shadows as an illusion and looked at himself as a magician, therefore he knew his secrets were not legally his. But what if shadows wasn't really an illusion at all? What if it was in fact a pantomime performed by a mime instead of a magician? Semantics aside, it seemed a fair question. After all, Raymond never spoke during the performance of shadows, and neither did the Dutchman. Maybe, if the court deemed shadows a pantomime, its secret could

be protected. That was the rabbit Raymond needed to pull from his hat in a crowded courtroom before a district judge. Raymond played a video of both performances, his, then the Dutchman's. The judge agreed. The performances were identical. He further agreed that shadows met the legal definition of a pantomime and was therefore protected under copyright law. This was great news for Raymond. But the Dutchman, being Dutch, changed his strategy. He argued that even though the pantomimes looked identical, his technique was fundamentally different than Raymond's,

which in turn made the pantomimes fundamentally different. The Dutchman said he could prove it and proposed to demonstrate his method to the court. This was bad news for Raymond. If the judge permitted the Dutchman to reveal his method, then Raymond would need to do likewise, and his secret, would become public knowledge. But then the judge made an extraordinary ruling. He wrote, quote, in discerning substantial similarity, the court compares only the observable elements of the works in question.

Therefore, whether the Dutchman uses Raymond's method, or a technique known only by various holy men of the Himalayas, or even real magic, the underlying secret is irrelevant, as long as the performances appear identical to an ordinary observer. In other words, Raymond got a district judge to acknowledge the possibility that Shadows was the result of real magic, and even though that real magic was unprotected under the law, the pantomime that surrounded it was, and that pantomime belonged to Raymond and nobody else. The question of damages has yet to be addressed, but it's safe to say that Dutchmen would very much like to make himself disappear. By speaking out, Raymond not only prevailed in court, he quite possibly changed the game for magicians everywhere.

Not bad for a guy who never talks. You see, Raymond doesn't just keep his mouth shut during each performance of shadows. He keeps his mouth shut all the time. In over 50,000 on-stage performances and countless TV appearances, Raymond has barely made a peep. His much taller, much louder partner does the talking for him, a guy who most people know by only his first name, which works out nicely, since Raymond now answers.

only to his last, which is why we know them today, as Penn and Teller. Anyway, that's the way I heard it. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Granger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Granger offers millions of products in fast-dependable delivery, so you can keep your facility stocked safe and running smoothly.

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