The following are three stories of things which I have not personally witnessed but which were recounted to me anecdotally in various forms. I can’t guarantee their veracity.
1. At Blackpool magic convention several years ago Dirk Losander saw someone selling a second hand floating table similar to one of his own designs. To prove a point he bought the table in question and smashed it to pieces in front of the seller, admonishing him for trading in knockoffs. It was however later revealed that the table in question was an original which predated Dirk’s entry into the floating table marketplace. For anyone new to magic, Dirk Losander is considered kind of a big deal on the international magic circuit so this was a surprising development.
2. The same thing happened one year where someone bought a copy of a trick named Red from Craig Petty, and tore it up in front of him. For anyone new to magic, Craig Petty was kind of a medium sized deal in the British magic circuit, having presented a review show with World Magic Shop on which he had made his views on copycat magic releases very clear¹, so the fact that Red was functionally identical to a trick called New Wave Prediction by magician Bob King.
3. I am an admin on a facebook group for magicians and as such I saw a similar event play out in real time this very week. A magic shop owner called James Anthony posted a special offer to the forum consisting of a special card deck for a trick named ILC², which is the signature effect of another one of the admins, Lawrence Turner. James claimed to not realise that this was what the ILC deck was, but he has worked alongside Lawrence as this trick was performed and couldn’t possibly have not known.
Intellectual property is complicated.
I feel like perhaps I’ve been unfairly vague about that first anecdote, but that’s the version of the story I heard first and I’ve had to fill in some of the blanks since then. Whilst there were floating tables before Dirk Losander’s, the improvements Dirk made to the method are considered to have advanced the floating table routine by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately this means that a pre Losander table without Dirk’s improvements looks like a poor substandard imitation. That said, to paraphrase Louis C.K.³, if you want to float a table and you don’t want to pay $2500, what choice do you have?
But whereas in comedy the individual delivery of a joke is the part which is closely guarded, a lot of magicians work pretty much from a book with minor personalisations. As discussion of magic methodology is not only discouraged but actively forbidden, these arguments play out in tiny industry echo chambers. Conversely When Louis C.K. found out Dane Cook was telling a joke very similar to one of his own, the fallout was very public, as was the similar outcry when Louis himself performed a skit on SNL which bore startling resemblance to Tig Notaro’s short film Clown Service.
The generally accepted reasoning behind this is Cryptomnesia.
Cryptomnesia is a recognised psychological effect whereupon people will remember a piece of information but forget where they heard it. Experimentation has proven that this is a genuine phenomenon, believed by many to be an evolutionary product of early human collaboration where remembering a survival plan was far more important than remembering who contributed most to it.
The majority of comedians accept this explanation because most have come to realise that they are just as likely to fall foul of cryptomnesia as they are to catch someone else in the act. There’s nothing worse than being outspoken about something you disapprove of and then being caught out for it yourself.
Whenever I think about it though, my mind leaps to that series of films that came out a few years ago, you know the ones: Scary Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie, Date Movie. There may have been more. Over time these films became increasingly incoherent, to the point where they were just a series of scene and character references from different movies interacting in an incongruent and therefore humourous way. The writing process seems to have involved binge watching as many popular movies as possible and occasionally saying “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” then trying to squeeze the resultant material into some kind of sensible sequence. It’s a good way to construct jokes, in fact it’s how most topical humour is written; watch lots of news and look for places where a funny thing might happen in an interaction about two current media events. But if you saturated yourself in comedy, the natural product is thinking of alternate takes or punchlines or funnier versions⁴ of the comedy you hear.
My hypothesis is that the Louis C.K. Birthday Clown sketch is a 3 minute skit based on a 13 minute film in which Louis just saw the idea of a depressed adult ordering a clown party and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if some other entertainers showed up, and then at the end it turns out the depressed adult wants to kill them.”
My basis for this hypothesis is that this is how magic tricks are developed. Magicians are often focused so singularly on magic that it occupies most thoughts, so the most common way a magic trick is invented is seeing another magician’s work and saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if you could do that trick without handling the cards?” Or whatever methodological flaw they detect⁵.
Of course just like a joke, what one person perceives as a flaw may vary wildly from person to person. So whereas one person may say “I wish I could do this without all the memory work” or “I hate using magnets, could this work with some kind of temporary adhesive instead?” and develop a somewhat original work based on that, another person may see a flaw in a minor design choice, outdated patter, or the fact that a trick costs $2500⁶.
Trying to fix cosmetic flaws like those is more difficult because the essence of the effect and the method aren’t really altered. It’s the same as someone saying “I love this joke about calling a child FFFFFFFFFFFF but wouldn’t it be funny if you named the kid RRRRRRRRRRRR?” which is the joke Dane Cook allegedly stole from Louis C.K.
There’s a lot of nuance involved in this topic because it raises the question of how much you need to change a thing for it to become a new thing in its own right. If you look at the history of many beloved modern magic tricks they’ll have origins in a derivation of a modification of an improvement of a copy of a poorly done first prototype performed in a back room of a burlesque club, whereas now a first prototype used once for a 10 second instagram clip locks down the whole concept in many peoples eyes. I’m not even sure if that’s wrong anymore, because a clip which gets a million views on instagram will almost certainly be seen by some capitalist opportunist who has the setup to manufacture and sell a thousand finished copies of a fully produced productised version before the inventor has even collected quotes for getting the gaffs printed.
On the other end of the scale back in the wild west of Victorian stage illusionists there are legendary tales of performers going to each others shows and rushing the stage mid show to get a better look at the props in use and performing an improved version of the same trick in a theatre around the corner a month later. The only possible retaliation in these cases was for the original to up their game again and make something better.
The only difference in this artistic competition vs land grab of product releases is that one of them is based in performance and every performance is created from scratch on the night and improves with every rendition, whereas tricks sold to the public (or as close to the general public as magic tricks extend) are created once and then. As soon as business and capitalism gets involved in shifting mass product the ethics and artistic motivation to meaningful improvement go out of the window.
If you read magic instructional books or watch magic instructional videos, you’ll see a lot of crediting of older principles and sleights to the originators, and behind the scenes this usually came about due to the full working of the trick being researched and the surviving creators being contacted to ask for permission, and there’s a really solid system of honour and respect when it works. I have no idea what would happen if the originators of the principles decided to pull the ladder up and refuse any derivative works, as the honour system doesn’t really have a time limit in the same way copyright and the public domain do.
This due diligence work of seeking the originators of very old principles is also a barrier to entry for many independent creators who are forced to publish their work through larger companies who have the research capability to find similar works and the name brand clout to get the blessing of those past creators.
I feel like I started this post with the intention of reaching a conclusion on this matter, but the level of nuance involved means it’s impossible. The whole issue seems to be separating into two camps of people. The first think that creators have a right to control their work and the way their work is used forever and any derivation or improvement should basically belong in some degree to them in perpetuity, and the other group who thinks that ideas are valueless gifts from the universe which you can’t own and all intellectual property is theft⁷.
I don’t ascribe to either of these positions, because I’ve seen how stupid the situation with patent law and trademark law is getting from my day job and trying to create strict laws to govern nebulous concepts like ideas and designs is pretty much impossible without creating a loophole that can be used by arseholes. An arseloop.
People who keep asking if I’ll release my tricks… this is basically why I haven’t yet. I don’t want to accidentally become the next story told about someone smashing up a trick in front of me at Blackpool, nor do I want to be the guy in the bar at Blackpool who says “You know that popular trick that everyone bought a few years ago? I invented that. Sold it to the publisher for £500, and they still haven’t paid me⁸.”
¹ He thinks they’re bad, in case this statement is too ambiguous.
² The full name of which is kept a secret due to its genius.
³ But Louis C.K. told the joke about rape which is a much worse crime than using a shitty floating table. I presume Dirk Losander would agree, but can’t confirm that for certain because while Losander’s views on substandard knock-off props are well documented, he’s never gone on the record about his views on sexual assault. So who knows? Louis C.K.’s stance on sexual assault is apparently between a stranger and the only door with his dick out so I’m surprised he ever tried to high road on this particular area. To be honest I only needed to namedrop a comedian to segue into the concept of cryptomnesia, which you would know if you were still reading the main text instead of filling up on this footnote.
⁴ Of course whether or not the resultant ‘improvement’ is actually funnier is very much down to personal taste.
⁵ Remember how I said that since there’s no such thing as actual magic, all methods will be imperfect in some way?
⁶ Of course if you wanted to be very cynical a person might see a flaw along the lines of “This is a great trick but it would be even better if I made it because then I could sell it and make that kind of money”.
⁷ All property is theft is one of those odd phrases that is often associated with anticapitalism, which as far as I know is meant to be a critique of alienated labour and value created by workers being transferred and aggregated to the asset holders who employ them. If raw materials are taken from the Earth and have their value increased with every process applied to them until you’re left with a radio you can buy on Amazon, then why are the people adding that value living in or near poverty, and Jeff Bezos, who literally just owns the website where you paid for the finished thing, is the richest man in the world? But people have this tendency to instead apply it to mean “All property is theft and therefore if I steal your car, that is just as legitimate as you toiling away for several years to afford it in this hellish system.” I bet somewhere out there a comedian or cartoonist has depicted a bully stealing a child’s lunch money and saying “All property is theft.”
Even ethics can be co-opted for evil ends. What’s wrong with the world?
⁸ This also happens, but is a story for another time.