Once you start to study The Law, if you have any basic deductive reasoning skills, you become quickly horrified when you see how deeply racism (and sexism, homophobia, transphobia...) is baked into the very fabric of our society through the laws and court decisions that have come down since our slave-owning forefathers wrote slavery into the Constitution. It's like getting an inside view, the sausage factory of racism, how the meat is made. An intro on racist-as-hell court decisions and laws is a blog post for another day, because today I'd like to talk to you about why copyright law, specifically, is racist as hell.

NDAs, #MeToo, and You

I got the idea for this post this past weekend when I was reading an article in Time (the one with AOC on the cover, I mean, can you even handle it?). The article was about Eliza Dushku (you’ll recognize her face from Buffy and Bring It On) and her “#MeToo Moment” (I have qualms with calling the public reliving of traumatic events a “moment” but that’s a topic for another day). She wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe about her most recent experience with sexual harassment on the set of her show Bull. She wrote the piece despite signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) as part of her settlement with CBS for $9.5 million - a ton of money but not as much as CBS would have paid her had she been able to complete her planned six-year contract with the network. Because Dushku feared litigation if she continued to discuss the settlement, for her interview with Time she tried to talk around the issue entirely. She did state, however, that “NDAs revictimize people. They give more power to the powerful. And as the less powerful person, you have to live in someone else’s fucked-up version of reality.” This quote, and Dushku’s story, are an apt example of why we should all be more aware, and wary, of non-disclosure agreements.