I Am Holden Caulfield

The best client you could have if you are an intellectual property lawyer is JD Salinger. The second best is JK Rowling. This is because they are both extremely litigious, guarantee great publicity, and because their aura of great virtue, together with the belovedness of their creations, helps them win.

Salinger is now challenging the right of a Swedish author to publish in the US a thinly veiled sequel to Catcher in the Rye; Rowling won her recent case against an author who wrote a guide-like reference work about the Harry Potter series. In the past, the 90-year-old Salinger has sued almost everybody else who has sought to benefit from or exploit Salinger or his work.

Salinger and Rowling are examples of the current anomaly in which intellectual property becomes ever more protected in traditional media, and ever more impossible to protect in digital media.

I am writing this in the air so I cannot check if jdsalinger.com or holdencaufiled.com have been taken, but, if they aren't, I will try to remember to grab them soon after I land. Alternatively, I will try for iamholdencaulfield.com--that could work, nicely. (At some point, we have all dreamed of being Holden Caulfield.)

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Comments

[itolduso]

12:49 PM on 06/23/2009

I've found it much easier to protect I.P. through the internet....sure, it enables pirates to exploit your work much faster, but it also makes it much easier to catch & document the infringements, and to contact those involved. The bigger problem is in protecting 'fair use'..... most who actually 'create' need fair use, it's the corporate 'owners' of I.P. that want to control all use....that's not good for anyone.