Professor Lydia Loren’s Article Selected as Best Law Review Article

Thomson Reuters (West) has judged Professor Lydia Loren’s article, Copyright Jumps the Shark: The Music Modernization Act, one of the best law review articles related to entertainment, publishing and/or the arts published within the last year. Thomas Reuters (West) has included the article in the 2020 edition of the Entertainment, Publishing, and the Arts Handbook, an anthology published annually.

Copyright Jumps the Shark analyzes the Music Modernization Act (MMA) and argues that “the MMA increases the disparity in treatment between musical work copyright owners and sound recording copyright owners.” The article asserts that, “[w]hile ultimately the royalties received by those two groups of copyright owners will likely become more similar, the way the MMA achieves that result is not through an equal treatment of the different copyrights.”

“The MMA is super long and incredibly detailed. The article goes into how crazy a piece of legislation the MMA really is and I used the ‘jumps the shark’ metaphor to illustrate that,” stated Loren. “The ‘jumps the shark’ metaphor came from Happy Days when Fonzie jumps a shark during a water skiing competition and it began to symbolize the end of something that was once really popular and really great, and now has become absurd,” Loren described.

In May 2019, Loren also presented her article at a symposium in honor of Professor Wendy Gordon at Boston University. “I was very excited to present this article at the Boston University Symposium,” stated Loren. “Revisiting Gordon’s body of work provided a variety of lenses that helped organize the analysis of the MMA presented in my article.”

Loren is currently a professor of law at Lewis & Clark and teaches classes in intellectual property, copyright, and property law.