With the Department of Justice’s proposed ebook pricing settlement pending, last week U.S. District Judge Denise Cote granted attorney and licensing expert Bob Kohn, who opposes the settlement, permission to file an amicus brief in the case. But she gave him a restriction: It could only be five pages long. Kohn had previously submitted a 55-page brief.
How to get condense 55 pages into five? Kohn went with a comic strip. “He called his daughter, Katie, who is studying for her Ph.D in film studies at Harvard, who connected him with a fellow student, Julia Alekseyeva. After conferring with Ms. Alekseyeva, Mr. Kohn wrote the script and she drew the illustrations,” the New York Times’ Media Decoder blog reports.
The five-page comic strip isn’t on par with “Calvin and Hobbes” or “Doonesbury,” but it’s a catchy way to distill Kohn’s argument — which is that the DOJ defines the ebook market too narrowly and mistakenly states that low prices, not efficient prices, are the true goal of antitrust law. And, it’s definitely more interesting than “Family Circus.”
Here’s the full brief.
