By Gary Rosen
From the 1920s to the 1950s, Ira B. Arnstein was the unrivaled king of music copyright litigants. He spent the better part of those 30 years trying to prove that many of the biggest hits of the Golden Age of American Popular Song were plagiarized from his turn-of-the-century parlor piano pieces and Yiddish songs. “I suppose we have to take the bad with the good in our system which gives everyone their day in court,” Irving Berlin once said, but “Arnstein is stretching his day into a lifetime.”
Arnstein never won a case, but he left an enduring imprint on copyright law merely by getting his days in court and establishing precedents that later led to copyright infringement judgments against such notables as George Harrison and Michael Bolton. Though his claims often strained judicial credulity, Arnstein had a gift for posing conundrums that engaged some of the finest legal minds of his era, forcing them to refine and sharpen their doctrines.
Over the years, Arnstein laid claim to more than a hundred standards of the Great American Songbook. This playlist of 15 songs — from Irving Berlin’s “A Russian Lullaby” of 1927 to Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris” of 1952 — is representative, and we have selected recordings that illustrate performance styles from the 20s to today. “No one,” as one lawyer wrote and you will agree, “can accuse Arnstein of courting feeble opposition.”
Gary A. Rosen is the author of Unfair to Genius: The Strange and Litigious Career of Ira B. Arnstein. He has practiced intellectual property law for more than 25 years. Before entering private practice, he served as a law clerk to federal appellate judge and award-winning legal historian A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.
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It's funny how, if you're open to thinking in slightly tangential ways, you can learn lots of writing- or author-related things in non-authorial settings. Like that time four years ago when I posted ten lessons I'd learned from watching Top Chef. This time, my lesson was derived from recent outings at rock concerts.
Last night, my friend Lisa treated me to some Cake - not the food, but the music of the band named Cake, best-known for their songs "Distance" and "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" and their funky cover of "I Will Survive." (It was Lisa's treat to celebrate my picture book deal with the good folks at tiger tales books.) We were both looking forward to the concert, especially Lisa, who has been waiting at least two years for them to return to Philly. To summarize our evening really briefly: We didn't care for the band. Don't get me wrong - their music was fine, but they mismanaged their concert time and some of the things that came out of the lead singer's mouth were really off-putting.
Now, Lisa was with M and I last Friday when we went to see The Airborne Toxic Event in concert (their biggest hit is "Sometime Around Midnight", which I can seriously listen to on replay quite a number of times in a row - such a great song structure!), and we are all still raving about how awesome it was. So I'll be drawing some comparisons here, but I promise that you don't have to know or like the music of either band in order to follow along. Although I can't help but repeat what I said in the post about Friday's concert - if you haven't yet heard The Airborne Toxic Event, you really should. And if you are on their tour route (in that post), you should see them. Now. Before they become HUGE. Because it is my belief (and Lisa's as well) that they are going to be big. Soon. But I digress.
What I learned about public appearances
1. No matter who you are, if people have turned out to see you, it's because they want to see you. In most cases, it's because they already like you (or your work), but in some cases it's because they are curious to learn more.
2. People who turn out to see you want to like you, even if they aren't sure exactly how much they like you already. The benefit of the doubt is in your favor. If you are at least okay, they will continue to like you.
A. If you are really good - you do a great job reading your work, say, or giving a presentation - they may well be converted into lifetime fans. This is what happened for M, Lisa and me at The Airborne Toxic Event Concert. Musically, they were phenomenal. When Mikel Jollett (the lead singer) spoke, he was genuine and super nice, and the rest of the band nodded along, made eye contact with the audience and seemed approachable. So much so that after the curtain call that came after the encore, band members came down into the audience to mix and mingle and take photos. (M has a photo of herself with Mikel; Noah (the bass player) came into the crowd a bit later - I think he changed first, and we talked to Daren Taylor (the drummer) in the parking lot, and M got a photo with him as well.) Lisa, M and I cannot speak highly enough of the concert AND of the band members.
b. If you are a jerk or if you phone in your performance at a speech or a reading or a meet & greet or at a signing, at least some percentage of the people who were your fans before they saw/heard/met you will decide never to buy another Cake song ever bother seeing, reading or recommending you again in the future. This is Lisa's and my experience with Cake, after John McCrea (lead singer) ruined our concert experience using a variety of tactics, some of which I'll detail below, but the final straw of which involved singling out a
On this day in history, June 11, 1920, Irving Howe was born. To celebrate his birth I turned to the American National Biography which led me to an entry by Shirley Laird. The ANB offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women – from all eras and walks of life – whose lives have shaped the nation. Learn about Irving Howe below.
Howe, Irving (11 June 1920-5 May 1993), literary critic and historian, was born in New York City, the son of David Howe and Nettie Goldman, grocery store operators and later garment workers. Irving Howe was married twice, first to Arien Hausknecht, with whom he had two children, and later to Ilana Wiener.
Howe became a socialist at fourteen, joining a faction led by Leon Trotsky. He graduated from City College of New York in 1940, claiming that he spent more time talking to fellow radicals than he spent in class. He completed a year and a half of graduate study at Brooklyn College before being drafted into the army in 1942; he served in Alaska for two or three years. When he returned to New York after the war, he began to publish articles in the Partisan Review, Commentary, and the Nation. In 1953 he founded Dissent, a political and literary journal that he edited for many years. In that year he became an associate professor of English at Brandeis University and also was appointed a Kenyon Review fellow. Leaving Brandeis in 1961, he spent 1961 to 1963 as a professor of English at Stanford University. From 1963 to 1970 he was professor of English at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he was named in 1970 Distinguished Professor of English.
Howe wrote or contributed to more than forty books, the most noteworthy of which are works of literary criticism. His first study, Sherwood Anderson (1952), was an analysis of Sherwood Anderson’s work and a rebuttal of Lionel Trilling’s assault on the realist movement in modern literature. Howe reveals himself a capable historian in his portrait of Anderson’s childhood in Ohio, and he is charitable in dealing with Anderson’s indistinctness and sentimentality. Howe’s next book, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (1952), provides a sensible and balanced preface to William Faulkner. Another high point of Howe’s literary career is Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study (1967), particularly his interpretation of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.
Howe’s political writing includes a wide variety of subjects: Politics and the Novel (1957); The Critical Point: On Literature and Culture (1973); Trotsky (1978); and The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson (1986). Based on three lectures on Ralph Waldo Emerson that Howe gave at Harvard University in 1985, The American Newness reflects his earlier optimism and pays tribute to some of his heroes such as Marx, Trotsky, and Ben-Gurion. One of Howe’s most enduring pieces is an essay published in Commentary in 1968, “The New York Inte
