"Own Your Magic: A Magician's Guide to Protecting Your Intellectual Property"

by Sara J. Crasson; foreword by David Copperfield

2019, 143 pages, $35.00

Magicians pull rabbits from hats. Seconds later, they make the rabbits disappear into thin air. You know a magic trick is at play. You are entertained despite having been fooled. But you want to know how you were fooled.

Magicians belong to one of history's oldest occupations. The first trace of magic dates back thousands of years to the Egyptian age. The Westcar Papyrus (c. 1700 BC) shows that magicians served at the royal palace during Egypt's fourth dynasty.

Wherever there is a secret, there is a desire to uncover it. The history of magic is replete with fear that tricks will be revealed and that ideas will be stolen. One well-known dispute happened in Goldin v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 22 F. Supp. 61 (S.D.N.Y. 1938). In 1923, Horace Goldin, a magician, patented the box he used in his famous "Sawing a Woman in Half" performance. To draw attention to their cigarettes, tobacco company R.J. Reynolds posted ads in newspapers 10 years later. These ads revealed several magic tricks' secrets, including Goldin's. Goldin sued R.J. Reynolds for unfair competition. Goldin's case was weak; patent applications require that inventions be described in some detail. That makes the contents of a patent publicly available. The court wrote: "Certainly this is a clear and detailed expose of the secret to the public by the plaintiff himself. Anyone who cares to can rightfully and lawfully procure a copy of said patent, containing a full detailed and diagramed explanation of the trick … ." Id. at 64.

The key to magic is keeping it a secret. Jim Steinmeyer, a famous inventor of magic tools, said, "In magic, people don't get inspired by a great trick. They just take it. You would hope that what you do inspires, but instead, it just inspires theft." Chris Jones, The Honor System, Esquire 140, 145 (Oct. 1, 2012).  Today, especially with social media, magicians face the possibility of seeing their secrets revealed sooner than ever.

IP laws help magicians. The laws can be used to enjoin other magicians from performing illusions and to prevent secrets from being disclosed. But magicians worry that the law offers insufficient protection. Magicians have therefore developed and enforced informal community norms to protect their magic.

Goldin's example shows the importance of knowing the limitations of intellectual-property laws to protect magicians' rights. The music and film industries have armed themselves well, understanding what IP laws can and cannot protect. The magic industry has not yet caught up with music and film. Magicians have been waiting for someone to teach them how to protect themselves.

Little has been written about protecting magic through IP laws. Valuable articles like Abracadabra!—Why Copyright Protection for Magic Is Not Just an Illusion (Janna Brancolini, 33 Loy. L.A. Ent. L. Rev. 103, 132 (2013)) and a book, Law and Magic: A Collection of Essays (Christine A. Corcos ed., 2010), discuss magic and IP law. But they are limited to areas like copyright law or contain only academic discussions. They do not offer practical advice useful for non-lawyers. And they do not cover the entire field of IP law applicable to magic. Chapter 7, F. Jay Dougherty, Now You Own it, Now You Don't: Copyright and Related Rights in Magic Productions and Performance, deals with copyright law; Chapter 8, Jacob Loshin, Secrets Revealed: Protecting Magicians' Intellectual Property Without Law, focuses on non-legal protection; and Chapter 9, Florian Faust, Selling Secrets: Legal Problems of the Magic Market, deals with German law and European Community Law.

Filling that gap is Sara J. Crasson's 2019 book, Own Your Magic: A Magician's Guide to Protect Your Intellectual Property. Own Your Magic is a comprehensive guidebook to protect magicians' works. It covers all areas of intellectual property: copyright, patent, trademark, and unfair-competition law. It contains practical information as well as academic content, including the forms and information magicians need to register their intellectual property. Own Your Magic will not substitute for retaining an IP lawyer. But magicians—and IP lawyers themselves—can put Own Your Magic on their bookshelves and use it as a reliable asset.

Crasson, a lawyer and magician, is the right person to have written Own Your Magic. With degrees from Harvard College and Fordham University School of Law, Crasson has established herself the leading authority on how IP law applies to magic. She has already published several articles on the relationship between IP laws and various performances, including magic. See Sara J. Crasson, Intellectual Property Laws and Magic, Genii Mag., March 13, 2013, at 40; The Limited Protections of Intellectual Property Law for the Various Arts: Protecting Zacchini, Houdini, and Cirque du Soleil, 19 Vill. Sports & Ent. L.J. 73 (2012).

As a practitioner, Crasson litigated about a wide variety of issues, including intellectual property. Currently, she is the principal law clerk to the Hon. O. Peter Sherwood, serving in the Commercial Division at the New York State Supreme Court at 60 Centre Street in Manhattan. A professionally trained magician, she is a member of the Academy of Magical Arts and the Society of American Magicians (SAM) and SAM's regional vice president for the North Atlantic Region. She sits on SAM's Ethics Committee and the Board of Directors of the Society of American Magicians Magic Center Foundation.

Own Your Magic, Crasson's latest work, is a must-read for those who need to protect their intellectual assets. As Crasson explains, "You'll have to decide how far you want to take enforcing your rights, if it is worthwhile for you to confront someone who is infringing, or even to sue." To make those decisions, magicians need to know the advantages and disadvantages of each way to protect intellectual property. Own Your Magic helps magicians make these decisions.

Crasson divides her book into four sections. In Section One, she gives an overview of what magicians can protect and how. She suggests what kind of works magicians consider protectable and which IP law might be used to protect those works. She offers many examples to sketch the picture of IP rights in general.

In Section Two, Crasson explains the types of intellectual property and how they work. She provides information about copyright, patent, trademark, and unfair-competition law. She uses plain language and clear examples to help readers understand legal concepts. These principles, Crasson notes, are not just for magicians. All who want to protect their IP can refer to this section.

If you know the limits of your rights, you will be better able to protect them. In Section Two, Crasson teaches readers how far they can go. She takes the "Lesson From History" approach. She explains how magicians have used legal protection in the past and offers instances when these laws have failed to provide meaningful information and when magicians' efforts to protect their work have backfired. For example, under patent law, as Goldin's "Sawing a Woman in Half" case shows, the public nature of a patent can make a magic trick unappealing and vulnerable to theft.

And, Crasson explains, trade secret law is not as effective in protecting rights as people might think. Trade secret law cannot protect a magician's rights if competitors can get the secret legitimately. For example, in the late 1870s, Crasson tells us, magician Buatier de Kolta sought to keep the paper-flower trick secret, but his paper flowers fell off the stage during one performance. One magician in the audience picked a paper flower and ran away. Since then, anyone can easily find de Kolta paper flowers, the core of his magic, in magic shops worldwide.

Section Three, which covers more than half of Own Your Magic, is what distinguishes this book most from other articles and books covering magic and IP. This section contains Crasson's experience advising clients and litigating IP cases. Magicians might want to register their IP rights. Crasson explains which forms must be submitted, how to fill out the forms, and when and where to submit them. Crasson also gives useful information readers want to know: how long will it take to issue a certificate of copyright registration; how much the filing fee is; what the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Pro Bono (free) program entails; how, before they apply for a patent, users can search for prior art; and what kind of information they need to include to complete a patent application. Section Three even gives readers a copyright and trademark online-application tutorial, from creating an online account to final registration. Crasson shows screen captures that offer step-by-step the information magicians need to fill out. She also includes a sample confidentiality agreement for trade secrets.

Having registered your rights does not mean that no one will infringe on them. In case someone infringes on your rights, you must know how to fight back. In Section Four, Crasson describes in the general order of increasing expense and what actions magicians can take to stop an infringer: from granting a license and sending a cease-and-desist letter to stopping the importation of infringing goods and suing an imitator. Section Four contains website URLs, email addresses, and phone numbers of the department where you can get help, such as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection help desk.

Crasson also explains how to cope with the current trend in which many infringements occur through social media. Thus, she describes how to send a takedown notice when copyrighted material is posted on YouTube. She provides information about where YouTube's copyright complaint form is available and further tells readers how to send copyright infringement notifications to YouTube's copyright department.

Only one (small) criticism. Perhaps because the author is introducing court cases as part of a history lesson, she does not cite some case law she mentions. In editions to come, Own Your Magic could best help magicians, performers, and lawyers if it provides citations so that they can further research the law themselves. It takes more than magic to research the law.

As acclaimed illusionist David Copperfield mentions in his foreword, "Magicians who are serious about their business should consider how important their intellectual property is and what they can do to protect it." Own Your Magic is an indispensable addition for magicians who want to protect their innovative and unique magic. It contains practical advice and information to help them protect their intellectual property.

Own Your Magic is not just for magicians. All who want to protect their work, and any lawyer who wants to help them safeguard their work, should own Own Your Magic. Their magic alone will not protect them, unless they protect their magic first.

Gerald Lebovits is an acting New York State Supreme Court justice in New York County and an adjunct at Columbia, NYU and Fordham law schools. Minji Kim is a 2019 NYU School of Law graduate and Justice Lebovits's judicial fellow.