Effects are not copyright protected.

Jonathan, I find your point provocative and spot on, as usual. (Although the plural of "ethos" is "ethoi" )

What some miss (even those like Drew, who love to give definitive answers to ethical questions) is that there is hardly a consensus in modern society regarding what ethics are. Jonathan, like Socrates, has done a little bit of logic twisting to "expose" this nuance.

I--simpleton that I am--always want to explore the nuances before I am comfortable answering.

Drew is correct in making a distinction between exposure as exposing the works of others and exposure as exposing trade secrets. But what he misses--and I have fought with him about this before on other threads--is that there are *many* further distinctions to be made.

With the YouTube vs. books example, for example, one can make distinctions between willful and accidental exposure, competence and incompetence, free information and fee-based information, and so on. Obviously, to expose a secret is to expose a secret. But there are degrees of exposure. Not every exposure to the cold results in frostbite. And what many say--and I agree--is that not every exposure of magic is a threat to the magical community.

But why I always come back to Jonathan's idea of the concept of "Magicdom" is this: we need--whether the threats are small or great--a kind of community "ethos" to preserve our community. This ethos needs to be re-defined in the age of the internet. (And this includes YouTube AND internet magic stores AND Dover Books AND Bittorrent AND mailable PDF books and so on.)

And the reason I always come back to Drew's "certainty" is this: it is not sufficient to use legal or market-based or relativistic views of ethics. We must return to the roots of the meaning of the word (as Jonathan has done) and think about its implications. We must rethink this and discuss it. To discuss it again and again is part of the deliberation necessary for people to come to some kind of consensus. If we cannot ever come to a consensus, Magicdom is impossible. (Which it admittedly could be.)

Precis: indeed, both Youtube and books expose. But they expose in different ways and to different degrees. And being "ethical" requires precisely an attempt to discern these differences.

Jeff

I would agree with all of that, if I thought that exposure (revelation of trade secrets to those outside the trade community) as relates to ethics had anything, at all, to do with threats to the magic community. The wrong in that variety of exposure is about violation of the rights of audience members or potential audience members to enjoy said art in it's pristine and intended state.

Jackscratch, but you have to agree, everything you speak of is subjective in nature, and you can only speak about ethics as it pertains to you.

Some folks, like me, rather know the mechanics of how something works than what the effect looks like.

Everyone knows I don't like magic, but I definitely enjoy the subtleties that went into the construction. To me, knowing what went through, in this case, the magicians mind when he/she constructed it is much more magical-- why did you bring up your hands to eye level? why did you lean in that direction? would it have mattered if you didn't do that?

I do agree with Stone. You come across as the difinitive, appointed source for your whole community; I don't quite understand why, and it really is disturbing. Of course, there are others that may be in sync with your approach, and that's okay. But, I would venture to say, the majority don't.

I've said it before and I will take it to the grave. "I find it highly offensive and unethical for some one to tell me how to live my life."

Lack of quality and disrespect. The teaching of something by someone who cannot perform an effect properly, only dilutes the art further.

Joey, if the person does, genuinely, have talent, would your position be any different. What if it was one of your heroes that woke up one day and decided to put up instructionals on youtube?

A process exists, and isn't even that complicated to access, by which anyone with an interest can learn any of the mechanics of effects found within the magic community. If someone has the talent and ability and interest, then what is the problem? They can learn all they want and need to know. There is nothing stopping them. There is no rule, ethical or legal, which says they can not or should not. If they are to lazy to follow the basic rules and principles, simple and undemanding as they are, that have been placed before them by our community, then I'm willing to risk that they might also not have the rest of what it takes to be a magician. It is a sacrifice well worth making.

Ethics are the same no matter who they pertain to. It is only the understanding, or lack there of, which is relative. The rights of an individual are bound only by the rights of others.

"Hero" is not a permanent state, it can easily be removed by counter-heroic actions.

If it was their material, sure. But I have no respect for all the penguin and ellusionist kids who can't even pull off a DL

Some books are exposure. Some aren't. Books like those by William Poundstone, i.e. Big Secrets, Bigger Secrets, etc. were published specifically to expose methods and secrets of proprietary material, such as DC's Statue of Liberty Vanish, The Don Wayne Floating Ball, and a number of other items. He also exposed, to a certain degree, the formula for Coca-Cola, the secret mantras of TI, and dozens of other things like that.

He obtained most of his magic secrets by purchasing the items from Abbott's or Tannen's, then summarizing the methods. There was nothing illegal there, but some of this may have cost some creators of magic tricks some sales, because there is a large contingent of people on the fringe of the magic community who buy tricks just to see how they work. Most of these people do not have any respect for magic and really should be doing something else, anyway.

The biggest problem with YouTube is the amount of proprietary material that gets put on there, especially copyrighted material. BlackShadow has misused the term "public domain." This is a legal term with a specific meaning. It means material that is not legally protected by copyright, trademark or patent, or material that has lost its protection due to the age of the material itself. It has NOTHING to do with availability.

Books that are published as teaching tools and not simply exposures of methods are not exposure, per se. The difference between exposure and teaching is quite simple. Exposure is non-transactional. Teaching is transactional and it is done on a need to know basis. If you go into a public library and dig through 2 dozen magic books so you can find out how to perform a particular piece of magic, then you have paid for the item in two ways. One is by your tax dollars, which support the library. The other is by the work you did to find the material.

Individual teaching works like that. You pay a teacher, he teaches you something. He may charge money. He may charge labor. He may have an apprenticeship program. But in one way or another, the student pays for the material. That's the transaction.

I wonder if it a transaction.
They offer you supposedly illicit knowledge
You pay with your attention.

What more precious thing can you offer than your time and attention?

If we assume that the average viewer of these on-line videos is less than 25 years old, their concept of time vs. money is different from that of someone who is older.

Yup, if a presenter can't make their case real quick they get labeled as lame or worse. Short attention span (or is it ADD) theater rulz

So if you offer a lame video maybe they are doing their friends a favor of repackaging the clips or as MST3k mix?

What a lot of the young folks on YouTube don't seem to realize -- or care -- is that a lot of the people coming up with new effects make their living solely off of marketing those effects.

For example, they reveal a great illusion such as Quarter Through Soda Can while justifying their actions by saying "Oh, Criss Angel makes enough money anyway." What they don't realize is that the REAL inventor of the effect, Wayne Houchin, doesn't make nearly the kind of money that Criss Angel does, and he is losing money by having people reveal his work for free.

The end result is that fewer people are going to want to spend time inventing new and fresh illusions, since they won't be able to make as much money selling them. Pretty much the only people that will bother inventing new illusions are people like Criss Angel who are able to make money off of presenting the illusion on TV, but never sell the secret to fellow magicians. The end result is that magic as a whole will grow stale.

Folks, it's been stale around here for almost a century. And every time we collectively tolerate those who take by buying from those who sell "borrowed" or "inspired by" works we scare away more of those who create new works.

I pretty much agree with the above up to the last line or so.

So what if the market dries up for the wannabes and trick addicts?

Those chosen by the muses will create new works to perform and those they have found trustworthy will have some access to those new works.

Whether they realize it or not is irrelevant; maybe they just don't care... Why should they? A. they are not magicians and B. there's no law that says they should care.

George Hotz gave the iphone hack away for free to the world... BFD! what's wrong with that?

I can't believe for one second that magicians are so stupid as to think the you tube problem is non-existent. Based on that, they don't care and continue to do instructionals. Accept the consequences of your actions.

Pirate John, I think you misinterpret the idea of what is originally created and what is not. For example, coin in soda can existed before Houchin. So did Stigmata and many others. Sure, the people heralded as "creators" added a few twists, but then so do the You Tube videos. In the case of YT more of the twists are rubbish than those that are worth pursuing, but that is for the experienced onlooker to decide.

The point is that Houchin has the same right as YT newbies to experiment with ideas and demonstrate their variation on an existing effect. One charges for the privilege, the other doesn't. The student has to decide what will best help his own presentation. In truth, the best presentation for the student will be neither Houchin's or a mangled YT version but the student's own work over many weeks or months on the basic idea to suit his own hands and style.

And, by the way, who cares if they have no talent or skill. If someone that does have talent or skill takes anything away then who cares about the instructional presentation.

I am sure many of you know how to do an effect better than the peron you learned it from.

All well and good C. though I would prefer the audience not be in a position to admire how well the performer does the method, hides the gaffs and performs the dove steals etc.

I still don't believe audiences traverse You Tube finding out methods in the same way they don't trawl through Magic Café. They would have a field day here too looking at methods.

If people are determined to find out there are loads of places apart from YT. Here, SOMF, Wiki, Magic Video dept, Learned Pig, or the local library. They all require time, work, and effort. YT is a pretty bad place to learn though. Most of the methods are warped or the handling is butchered.

You really have to find the needles in a haystack or know the hidden untagged (non bootleg) demos which are not butchered. There are some good young performers like XCmaninpulator. (No "exposure" in the worst sense) Just demos of effects as performed and tutorials on flourishes.

My main complaint with Youtube has nothing to do with exposure--as you point out, there are a lot of sources out there for those determined enough to find it.

My main complaint with Youtube is amateurism and the strange desire some have to prematurely become "teachers". I suppose at the most basic level it's just kids "sharing". But I still find it strange.

It's as if I decided to teach someone, say, Serbo-Croatian. Since I don't know Serbo-Croatian, I have to take lessons. So each week I take a lesson, master the lesson, and then teach my student the next week. By keeping one week ahead, I am a "teacher" of Serbo-Croatian. But is this really "teaching"?

That is how I see Youtube, for the most part: people who have mastered nothing other than a few sleights making "tutorials". They have no real performance experience to speak of--thus no genuine tips to give which could only arise from such experience. Even if they do not expose, they irritate me with what is essential a rather arrogant assumption: that they are qualified to be teachers. I personally find this unethical, but I know that most here would probably disagree. Nevertheless, I stay away from Youtube because it bothers me to see 12 year-old kids teaching everybody everything from magic to Kant to how to play Purple Haze on the guitar.

Jeff