Of Copyrights and the Economy

Yesterday during one of my many, many sleepless nights, I decided to boot up my computer to research some case intake trends for LegalMatch.  Why you ask?  Well aside from the fact that I love this company and its 25-cent soda machine, which by the way may also be a reason for my insomnia, I found it to be the best way to knock me unconscious, a close second only to valium, of course.  Hahaha, I kid, I kid, I love looking up LegalMatch statistics and pleasing the mighty gods who sign my paycheck.  As long as I don’t have to sacrifice goats, I’m fine with whatever you guys want me to do…

Seriously though, a lot of times when I’m writing these blogs, I don’t really have a direction.  I kind of just go online or through LegalMatch’s system until something strikes me.  As I was going through it I started to notice an odd trend.  The number of copyright dispute cases we’ve been receiving has increased a lot over the past couple of years.  After grabbing my calculator, I found out the jump was pretty significant, a little over 50 percent since 2008.

Here at LegalMatch, we get a lot of cases concerning many different areas of law.  As is customary in the legal field, there really isn’t any sort of rhyme or reason to the frequency of the types of cases received.  Unlike the retail industry, legal issue requiring litigation can spring up at anytime.  Also some fields of law are by nature busier than others.  For example, personal injury cases are always plentiful because injuries happen all the time – hence all the lawyer TV ads you see during daytime television.

But copyright cases have always been pretty stable, neither dropping off or spiking significantly.  Which was why it was so weird when I saw noticed were getting a lot of these types of disputes all of a sudden.  It didn’t make much sense to me.  The RIAA has been around for years now, along with numerous other intellectual property protection groups, so why the spike now?

Then it hit me.  It was probably due to the economy.  With so many people out of work nowadays, it’s not too big of a stretch to imagine that people probably have a lot more time on their hands.  Time to pursue other independent projects, time to be creative and pursue that dream of being a travelling vagabond artist or in lieu of that, a writer, musician, or some inventor of the Magic Bullet!!  That thing is awesome until you realize it’s smaller than a blender and instead of cleaning one big container, you have to clean 6 small ones.

Anyway, getting back to my point, the vast majority of copyright cases LegalMatch handles involves a plaintiff trying to either enforce a copyright or get a copyright.  In other words, it’s people trying to protect their work against someone they believe infringed on their work or are trying to ensure that their work is protected in the future.

So is there a lesson here?  Well, one is if you have a job, hold on to it like your life depended on it because it probably does and if you lose it you’ll be stuck in a litigation nightmare where you’ll be trying to protect your claim on some song you wrote in the 80s.  Another is having your own anesthesiologist might sound like a cool idea, but it’s really not.