Friday Links

  • We hope and trust that you had a fine Thanksgiving yesterday. The comic book cover depicted above is that of Famous Funnies #16 – published way, way back in November of 1935 and speculated to be the very first Thanksgiving-themed comic book cover.
  • Today is also Black Friday, which means that if you venture out into the world today in search of would-be Christmas gifts, you do so at your own peril. Our suggestion: Hide from the world today in a tryptophantastic coma and watch college football.
  • The Texas State Bar’s Say What?! blog posts humorous hearing and deposition excerpts that were initially compiled by the late U.S. District Judge Jerry Buchmeyer in his bar journal column. Music fans that we are, we couldn’t resist sharing this funny excerpt originally published in 1995 and republished on the blog last week:

    A. You’ve got to figure I’m a pretty conservative lady. This is the first concert I have ever been to.

    Q. Of any kind?

    A. Well, I take that back. I went to Jerry Lee Lewis when I was 16 years old.

    Q. There was no shooting at that concert, was there?

    A. No. A whole lot of shaking going on, but no shooting.

    Of course, we had to explain to our new associates who Jerry Lee Lewis is. Oh, well.

  • Speaking of music, David Post of The Volokh Conspiracy opines on the copyright implications of the new album by Girl Talk, an act known for unsanctioned mash-ups of other group’s songs. Says Post: “Unfortunately,this is just the sort of creative activity that copyright law, in its current incarnation, makes almost impossible for anyone who (unlike Girl Talk) is unwilling to face potentially catastrophic liability risks. It would take you hundreds of hours of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars to clear the rights to this album even if you wanted to — a pretty sorry state for a law that is supposed to be incentivizing, not prohibiting, creative expression to be in.” Post’s co-author, Stewart Baker, also weighs in on this Girl Talk/copyright issue here.
  • Yesterday, by the way, was a huge traffic day for our site. In this post, Walter Olson of Overlawyered linked our our “Thanksgiving in 1810, 1910, and 2010,” which was then followed by this post from the well known Instapundit blog linking the same piece. Since then, we’ve had record levels of website traffic from all sorts of different sources.
  • Don’t forget: You can follow Abnormal Use on Twitter at @gwblawfirm. (In fact, check out our GWB 2.0 website for all of our social media endeavors as a blog and law firm.).

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