Reading Comprehension

PT149 · S2 · P3 · Q19 Social Norms & Intellectual Property

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Passage A Comedians are not amused when their jokes are stolen, and for that reason we might expect joke-stealing disputes to ripen into lawsuits occasionally.

Topic

The protection of creative content (jokes and recipes) among comedians and chefs, and how social norms substitute for ineffective or unavailable legal protection.

Framework

Answer / Explain

Main Point

Even though comedians and chefs can’t rely on traditional intellectual property law to protect their jokes or recipes, both groups use strong social norms within their communities to regulate ownership, copying, and credit—effectively serving a legal-like function and preserving incentives for creativity. (Passage A, paragraph 3) (Passage B, paragraph 1)

P1: Comedy and Copyright Law

Comedians rarely take legal action against joke thieves, even though jokes can be technically protected by copyright. That’s because the cost of litigation is high, legal success is uncertain, and copyright law just doesn’t work well for comedians in practice.

P2: The Puzzle of Comedy Innovation

But if the law doesn’t protect comedians, why do they bother coming up with so much new material?

P3: Social Norms Among Comedians

It’s because comedians have their own system of social norms—a set of unwritten community rules—backed up by consequences like damaging someone’s reputation. This informal “norms system” does most of what copyright law would do: it lets comedians claim ownership, control use, punish joke theft, and gives them a reason to keep coming up with new ideas.

19.

The author of passage A would be most likely to agree with which one of the following statements?

Correct
The social norms that are
Why this is right
The author establishes in her second paragraph the typical understanding of intellectual property: if people can't be secure in the idea that they will be able to control (and monetize) the fruits of their creative labor, then they won't continue to innovate. At the beginning of the 3rd paragraph of Passage A, the author affirms that the social norms used by comedians "substitute for IP law". And in her final sentence, she affirms that by using this system of social norms, comedians are able to maintain substantial incentives to invest in new material. What incentives are we talking about? Money! In the second paragraph the author is saying that "if you didn't have legal protection for your material, potential creators would be deterred by the unlikelihood of recouping the cost of their creations." So if comedians seem to find the social norms a satisfactory way of protecting their material and if they seem to be willing to invest in new material, then it's supportable to say that under the social norms system, they are able to recoup the costs of their creations.
Skill tested: Author Opinion · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
53% picked this
Comedians should increase their reliance
Opposite
The author seems impressed and content with the effectiveness of the social norms system. She isn't agitating comedians to use copyright law instead. The end of her 1st paragraph indicates that she's sympathetic with the futility of going the copyright law route: it simply does not provide comedians with a cost-effective way of protecting their material. And the beginning of her 3rd paragraph attests to the success of the social norm system: social norms substitute for intellectual property law. In her final sentence, she says that "using this informal system, comedians are able to [get the stuff they would normally get out of legal IP protection]."
1% picked this
Most professional comedians are largely
Too Strong: most
Not only does this cut against the gist of paragraph 2, but it's more specific than the author ever got. We could say that most comedians don't use copyright law, since the author quantified that it's almost never used, and we could say that most comedians don't want their jokes to be stolen (since she generalized about comedians), but we can't find any line reference that allows us to say more than 50% of professional comedians are largely unconcerned with the expense of writing new material.
4% picked this
Law-based intellectual property systems generally
Unknown Comparison
The author seems to think that for comedians the social norms system is nicely playing the role that a law-based IP system would have played (in a more economically realistic way). But we can't say she would sign off on the idea that GENERALLY this is the case. She might think that when it comes to software, biotech, energy, etc. that law-based IP systems work at least as well (or presumably better) than social norm systems.
18% picked this
Existing copyright law should be
Out of Scope: should be modified
The author sympathizes in the first paragraph with why comedians would find the existing copyright law system an impractical source of remedy, both because the money you have to spend to bring a lawsuit outweighs the amount of money comedians are typically making, and because it's very hard to prove someone stole your joke. But she's not necessarily blaming the existing copyright law system or suggesting that it should be changed to cater to comedians.
23% picked this

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