Law and Business of the Entertainment Industries, 5th Edition

I would basically have to agree with Jen’s review about this book. There are too many cases, the book is huge and the font is small…especially in the notes sections. The inclusion of various types of contracts has its plusses and minuses. I feel as if the contracts are stuck in the book in their entirety, but they’re not necessarily explained. Thus, even if you’re in law school, you’re reading the contracts, not understanding the language and then not getting an explanation of the contracts. It’s almost the same as reading the contracts as a complete layperson. The worst part is that there are tons of these contracts. Someone who taught this course as an adjunct at my law school assigned pretty much all the contracts in the book to read.

Obviously, they are not captivating reading, so if you’re in this position you can get stuck reading boring contracts that you don’t understand and a professor who assigns all these contracts to read but doesn’t explain them well enough–either because he’s a lawyer in this field and it makes way more sense to him than to you and/or because he’s a practicing attorney rather than a real law professor and, thus, doesn’t really know how to teach. I think both applied in my situation, and, unfortunately, people teaching entertainment law oftentimes will be practicing attorneys and/or completely over your head with knowledge.

I don’t feel as if this book is well-written, and sometimes the contracts aren’t the only things that don’t make sense or aren’t explained well enough. Terms are thrown out or descriptions/explanations of the industry are given sometimes in ways that don’t help someone who knows nothing about it…or at least doesn’t know about the areas being covered by a particular chapter. I’m not just talking about the legal aspects; I am also referring to the actual industry itself and the way things work in it. That makes this book much worse than the average legal casebook. And with the size of this book–and, as a result, the amount of material covered in it–a lot of stuff that doesn’t always make sense is thrown at you, and that’s hard to deal with, even for a law student. And with other books I’ve seen and/or read on the market that explain the entertainment industry, this book could easily be less in-depth/complicated and shorter, even including the same amount of cases.

In other words, this book is just not brought down to a dummy’s level enough, or even enough to be taught in law school. And it takes what should be an interesting subject and makes it completely devoid of intrigue. For people who are interested in this book outside of school reading and want to know more about the intersection of business, entertainment and/or law, this is not the book to read or refer to. What I did like about this book is when I could understand it, it presented a lot of interesting cases and information about the industry, even in its complicated contracts. Still, professors and teachers, please find a better textbook if you’re using this to teach…or arrange your class lectures in a way that breaks the book down in English!