Most Recent Posts

Nike-owned Converse, the company responsible for the Chuck Taylor All Star shoe, is suing to stop other shoemakers from copying what it says are distinctive elements of its design: the rubber toe cap, the rubber bumper and two thin, black stripes.

Similar shoes are available from a number of retailers. Take a look at some of the copycats and you'll see that they bear a strong resemblance, from the soles to the stitching. But in fashion, imitation isn't necessarily illegal.

Commentary: The Great American Sneaker

Add to Playlist

Download

NYU law professor Chris Sprigman tells NPR's Arun Rath that this might be a steep, uphill battle for Nike.

"The law basically says that elements of a design of a product — be it a shoe or anything else — that are functional cannot be protected by trademark law," Sprigman says.

Sprigman says early advertisements from Converse label the rubber bumper as functional, and that the toe cap is clearly functional as well. That just leaves the stripes, which other shoes have featured for decades.

Asia

China Laces Up Its Chuck Taylors

Sprigman says copying in fashion is common.

"New styles appear, they become widely copied [and] the copying signals that a trend has taken hold," he says.

People buy into that trend, he says, because they want to be in fashion. As the copying continues, the early adopters see the rise of imitators and jump off, and the trend dies, he says. They then jump on the next trend, and the fashion cycle begins again.

"So without copying, paradoxically, the fashion industry would be smaller and less innovative and poorer," he says.

Going Olde-School with Basketball Shoes

Add to Playlist

Download

What Nike has in its favor, Sprigman says, is that the iconic Converse star is protected, so the copies can't use that logo. So, with the copying signaling that the shoe is coming back into style, the star mark gains cachet among the fashion-conscious and makes the real Converse more exclusive, possibly to the benefit of Nike.

Applying copyright to fashion, Sprigman says, doesn't work the same way as applying it to other creative mediums like film or music. He says copyright law is meant to "incentivize the creation of new art, literature, science [and] technology."

From Our Listeners

Sneakers: Listeners' Stories Laced With Love

"If we have an area of creativity where we don't need these property rights to incentivize production, then maybe we shouldn't have them," he says.

Fashion is a good example of this, he says, where there is already a lot of innovation and competition. He says applying copyright law there might actually slow down innovation and increase the cost of clothes.

"It's not really the question whether we should have copyright just because it's expression. The question is whether copyright or trademark or patent is necessary to bring us innovation," he says. "I think the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no — it depends on the kind of expression or innovation you're talking about."

copyright

shoes

Knock-offs

Fashion

Nike

The dustiest portion of my home library includes the 1980s books — about how Japan's economy would dominate the world.

And then there are the 1990s books — about how the Y2K computer glitch would end the modern era.

Go up one more shelf for the late 2000s books — about oil "peaking." The authors claimed global oil production was reaching a peak and would soon decline, causing economic chaos.

The titles include Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression, Peak Oil Survival and When Oil Peaked.

When those books were written, worldwide oil drillers were producing about 85 million barrels a day. Now they are pumping about 93 million barrels.

NPR/U.S. Energy Information Adminstration

Despite growing violence in the Middle East, oil supplies just keep rising.

At the same time, the growth rate for demand has been shrinking. This week, the International Energy Agency cut its forecast for oil-demand growth for this year and next. Turns out, oil demand growth — not production — is what appears to have peaked.

Now prices are plunging, down around 25 percent since June.

What did the forecasters get so wrong? In large measure, their mistake was in failing to appreciate the impact of a relatively new technology, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

Because of fracking, oil is being extracted from shale formations in Texas and North Dakota. Production has shot up so quickly in those areas that the United States is now the world's largest source of oil and natural gas liquids, overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia.

This new competition has shocked OPEC. Members say they want to maintain their current market share, so they are keeping up production and even boosting it.

Bottom line: The peak of production is nowhere on the horizon.

So are the authors of "peaking" books now slapping themselves in the head and admitting they had it all wrong?

Some are, at least a bit.

Energy analyst Chris Nelder wrote a book in 2008 titled Profit from the Peak. The cover's inside flap said: "There is no doubt that oil production will peak, if it hasn't already, and that all other fossil fuels will peak soon after."

In a phone discussion about his prediction, Nelder said "my expectation has not materialized."

The surge in oil production in Texas and North Dakota "has really surprised everyone," he said. "If you had told me five years ago we'd be producing more oil today, I would have said, 'No way.' I did not believe at all that this would happen."

But while he acknowledges that oil has not peaked yet, he says it might soon because "oil is trapped on a narrow ledge" where it must stand on stable prices. Holding the price of a barrel steady around $110 for years allows energy companies to invest in fracking operations.

Over the past three years, those are exactly the conditions drillers have enjoyed. Oil was sitting pretty on a stable plateau of roughly $110 a barrel. But now, as global growth slows, the price is plunging, down to around $83 per barrel.

Related NPR Stories

Parallels

As Oil Prices Fall, Who Wins And Who Loses?

Energy

With U.S. Oil Supply Climbing, Some Call For End To Export Ban

Falling Oil Prices Could Affect Manufacturing, Automobile Industries

Crude Oil Prices Drop As Saudis Refuse To Cut Production

"China is cooling off quite a bit. Much of Europe is slipping back towards recession," Nelder said. If oil prices stay low for long, frackers may need to stand down. "There is a lower level [in price] where they just can't make money," he said.

And with OPEC pumping so much oil now to hold down prices, maybe they are using up their supplies more quickly. "Depletion never sleeps," he said.

So perhaps Nelder has been wrong so far, but could be right before too long.

That's what Kenneth Worth thinks. He's the author of Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression, a 2010 book. He says the fracking boom has been so frenzied in this decade that drillers may have extracted the cheapest oil already. With fracking, oil supplies "deplete very rapidly. You have to keep drilling really fast," he said.

With prices now so low, the money to keep up the frenzy may not be there.

So maybe the "peaking" predictions weren't wrong, just premature. Then again, at some point, any forecast can turn out to be right, he says. "If you take enough of a timeline, eventually we're all dead," Worth noted.

peak oil

oil

fracking

Oscar-winning actress Geena Davis has played unforgettable roles in movies like Beetlejuice, Thelma and Louise and A League of Their Own, and she's been an outspoken advocate for female representation in cinema and TV.

But long before her acting debut, Davis had a surprising job at an Ann Taylor clothing store. She wasn't just selling the merchandise; she was displaying the clothes alongside the mannequins.

'An Uncanny Ability To Be Still'

"One time there was a window display where the mannequins were sitting at a table eating plastic food," Davis tells NPR. "There was one empty chair, and I kept looking at the window."

She asked her co-workers if she should go sit in the empty chair. They advised against it.

But Davis sat in the chair anyway.

"Somebody saw me do that, and then he stopped to see what was now going to happen. But I just froze," Davis says. "I didn't know, but I had an uncanny ability to be still."

Eventually, a crowd gathered on the sidewalk outside the window display. She could hear the comments from the onlookers, who couldn't tell if she was real or fake.

"When I felt like their attention was drifting, I would move kind of like a robot," she says. "But then somebody said, 'Well, that's not an electric mannequin because it's not plugged in.' "

So the next time she sat in a window display, she put a tiny wire down her leg.

"Because it was really subtle, it really worked," she says.

The store eventually hired her to be in the window on the weekends.

"Yes," she says. "I was a live mannequin."

Casting Call

After her career as a mannequin, Davis signed with a modeling agency.

"At that time, the big models like Christie Brinkley and Lauren Hutton were getting parts in movies. I thought, 'Oh, well, all I have to do is become a successful model and then maybe I'll get hired for movies,' " she says, laughing at her idea that becoming a supermodel would be a breeze.

Meanwhile, the 1982 film Tootsie, starring Dustin Hoffman, was going to shoot in New York.

More On Geena Davis

Movies

Casting Call: Hollywood Needs More Women

Monkey See

Working Women On Television: A Mixed Bag At Best

"There was a part as Dustin's dressing roommate for someone that's going to be in their underwear a lot of times," she says. "So the casting director thought, 'Let's call model agencies and see if they have any models who can act.' "

Sure enough, Davis was called in for her very first movie audition.

"They said, 'Wear a bathing suit under your clothes because if you read well, they're going to want to see you in a bathing suit to see how you would look in your underwear,' " she says.

But during the audition, they never asked to see her bathing suit, and Davis assumed she didn't get the part.

"I put it completely out of my mind," she says.

'Perfectly Lit, Airbrushed, Wind-Blowing-In-Your-Hair Photos'

Little did she know, director Sydney Pollack had reviewed her audition tape.

Since they forgot to get a picture of Davis in her bathing suit, Pollack asked if she could come back and take a photo. But Davis had since moved on from her audition and was on the other side of the world modeling at runway shows in Paris.

"My good fortune at that moment was that I had been in the Victoria's Secret catalog," Davis says. "So they sent over the catalog with these perfectly lit, airbrushed, wind-blowing-in-your-hair photos."

That's what did it. Davis got the part as April.

"My big break was getting cast in Tootsie as my very first acting job and as a result of my very first audition," Davis says. "That's a ridiculous, ridiculous break to get. But that is exactly what happened."

models

actors

When Bryan Stevenson was in his 20s, he lived in Atlanta and practiced law at the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee.

One evening, he was parked outside his apartment listening to the radio, when a police SWAT unit approached his car, shined a light inside and pulled a gun.

They yelled, "Move and I'll blow your head off!" according to Stevenson. Stevenson says the officers suspected him of theft and threatened him — because he is black.

The incident fueled Stevenson's drive to challenge racial bias and economic inequities in the U.S. justice system.

Just Mercy

A Story of Justice and Redemption

by Bryan Stevenson

Hardcover, 336 pages | purchase

Purchase Featured Book

TitleJust MercySubtitleA Story of Justice and RedemptionAuthorBryan Stevenson

Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How?

Amazon

iBooks

Independent Booksellers

Nonfiction

History & Society

More on this book:

NPR reviews, interviews and more

Read an excerpt

"[It] just reinforced what I had known all along, which is that we have a criminal justice system that treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent," Stevenson tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "The other thing that that incident did for me was just remind me that we have this attitude about people that is sometimes racially shaped — and you can't escape that simply because you go to college and get good grades, or even go to law school and get a law degree."

Stevenson is a Harvard Law School graduate and has argued six cases before the Supreme Court. He won a ruling holding that it is unconstitutional to sentence children to life without parole if they are 17 or younger and have not committed murder.

His new memoir, Just Mercy, describes his early days growing up in a poor and racially segregated settlement in Delaware — and how he came to be a lawyer who represents those who have been abandoned. His clients are people on death row — abused and neglected children who were prosecuted as adults and placed in adult prisons where they were beaten and sexually abused, and mentally disabled people whose illnesses helped land them in prison where their special needs were unmet.

In one of his most famous cases, Stevenson helped exonerate a man on death row. Walter McMillian was convicted of killing 18-year-old Ronda Morrison, who was found under a clothing rack at a dry cleaner in Monroeville, Ala., in 1986. Three witnesses testified against McMillian, while six witnesses, who were black, testified that he was at a church fish fry at the time of the crime. McMillian was found guilty and held on death row for six years.

Stevenson decided to take on the case to defend McMillian, but a judge tried to talk him out of it.

"I think everyone knew that the evidence against Mr. McMillian was pretty contrived," Stevenson says. "The police couldn't solve the crime and there was so much pressure on the police and the prosecutor on the system of justice to make an arrest that they just felt like they had to get somebody convicted. ...

"It was a pretty clear situation where everyone just wanted to forget about this man, let him get executed so everybody could move on. [There was] a lot of passion, a lot of anger in the community about [Morrison's] death, and I think there was great resistance to someone coming in and fighting for the condemned person who had been accused and convicted."

But with Stevenson's representation, McMillian was exonerated in 1993. McMillian was eventually freed, but not without scars of being on death row. He died last year.

"This is one of the few cases I've worked on where I got bomb threats and death threats because we were fighting to free this man who was so clearly innocent," Stevenson says. "It reveals this disconnect that I'm so concerned about when I think about our criminal justice system."

i i

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Alabama, and a professor at NYU Law School. Nina Subin/Courtesy of Random House hide caption

itoggle caption Nina Subin/Courtesy of Random House

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Alabama, and a professor at NYU Law School.

Nina Subin/Courtesy of Random House

Interview Highlights

On how the police got witnesses to testify falsely in the McMillian case

They did coerce the witnesses to testify falsely against him and for some bizarre reason tape-recorded some of these sessions.

So you hear this tape where the witness is saying, "You want me to frame an innocent man for murder? I don't feel right about that."

The police officer is saying, "Well, if you don't do it, we're going to put you on death row, too."

They actually did put the testifying witness on death row for a period of time until he agreed to testify against Mr. McMillian. Other witnesses were given money in exchange for their false testimony.

But it was challenging because even when we presented all of that evidence — and we presented Mr. McMillian's strong alibi, the first couple of judges said, "No, we're not going to grant relief."

It took us six years to get a court to ultimately overturn the conviction. I think it speaks to this resistance we have in this country to confronting our errors, to confronting our mistakes.

On the case taking place where To Kill a Mockingbird is set

One of the really bizarre parts of this whole case for me was this whole episode took place in Monroeville, Ala., where Harper Lee grew up and wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. If you go to Monroeville, you'll see a community that's completely enchanted by that story. ... They have all of this To Kill a Mockingbird memorabilia. The leading citizens enact a play about the book. You can't go anywhere without encountering some aspect of that story made real in that community.

And yet, when we were trying to get the community to do something about an innocent African-American man wrongly convicted, there was this indifference — and, in some quarters, hostility.

On the lasting effects of wrongful convictions and McMillian's dementia

One of the things that pains me is we have so tragically underestimated the trauma, the hardship we create in this country when we treat people unfairly, when we incarcerate them unfairly, when we condemn them unfairly.

You can't threaten to kill someone every day year after year and not harm them, not traumatize them, not break them in ways that [are] really profound. Yet, when innocent people are released, we just act like they should be grateful that they didn't get executed and we don't compensate them many times, we don't help them, we question them, we still have doubts about them.

“ You can't segregate and humiliate people decade after decade without creating long-lasting injuries.

- Bryan Stevenson, human rights lawyer

I saw that create this early-onset dementia [in McMillian] that many of the doctors believed was trauma-induced, was a function of his experience of being nearly killed — and he witnessed eight executions when he was on death row. ...

One of the things I just wanted to people to understand is we can't continue to have a system of justice defined by error and unfairness and tolerate racial bias and bias against the poor and not confront what we are doing to individuals and to families and to communities and to neighborhoods. [McMillian] is in some ways a microcosm of that reality. He's representative of what we've done to thousands of people.

On representing people on death row and witnessing executions

One of the first cases I ever dealt with where the man was executed was a surreal case where ... I drove down to be with this man before his scheduled execution. ... They shave the hair off the person's body before they put them in the electric chair and we're standing there, [having a] very emotional conversation, holding hands, praying, talking.

I remember him staying to me, "Bryan, this has been such a strange day. When I woke up this morning the guards came to me and said, 'What do you want for breakfast?' And at midday, 'What do you want for lunch?' In the evening they said, 'What do you want for dinner?' " All day long he said they kept saying, "What can we do to help you? Can we get you stamps to mail your last letters? Can we get you water? Can we get you a phone to call your friends and family?" I'll never forget that man saying ... "More people have said, 'What can I do to help you?' in the last 14 hours of my life than ever did in the first 19 years of my life."

I remember standing there, holding his hands, thinking, "Where were they when you were 3 years old being abused? Where were they when you were 7 and being sexually assaulted? Where were they when you were a teenager and you were homeless and struggling with drug addiction? Where were they when you came back from war struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder?" And with those kinds of questions resonating in my mind, this man was pulled away and executed.

It's a really surreal and I think deeply destructive act to kill a person who is not a threat to other people. But that's our system and that's one of the reasons why getting people closer to that system is one of my new priorities — and one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book.

On changing the conversation about race

Our newest project at the Equal Justice Initiative is really trying to change the conversation about race in this country. We've done a very poor job at really reflecting on our legacy of racial inequality. ... You see it in the South, but it's everywhere.

And we want to talk more about slavery and we want to talk more about this era between Reconstruction and World War II, which I call "An Era of Racial Terrorism" — of racial terror and violence that shaped attitudes. I want to talk more about the civil rights era, not through the lens of celebration. We're too celebratory of civil rights these days. We have these 50th anniversaries and everyone is happy and everybody is celebrating. Nobody is talking about the hardship.

It's almost as if the civil rights movement was this three-day event: On Day 1, Rosa Parks didn't give up her seat on the bus. On Day 2, [the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.] led a march on Washington. And on the third day, we signed all of these laws. And if you think about that history in that way, you minimize the trauma, the damage, the divides that were created. You can't segregate and humiliate people decade after decade without creating long-lasting injuries. ...

Our newest project is really trying to introduce some concept of what transitional justice requires: some commitment to truth and reconciliation.

On justice in the 21st century

The new statistic from the Justice [Department] is really disheartening: The Justice Department is now reporting that 1 in 3 black male babies born in the 21st century is expected to go to jail or prison. The statistic for Latino boys is 1 in 6. That statistic was not true in the 20th century. It was not true in the 19th century. It didn't become true until the 21st century. That means we have enormous work to do to improve our commitment to [a] society that is not haunted and undermined and corrupted by our legacy of racial inequality.

The same is true for poverty. We've got a bigger population of poor people in this country than we've had in a generation, and we've got to take on the challenges of poverty. ... For me, that means taking it on in a different way. I'm not persuaded that the opposite of poverty is wealth — I've come to believe ... that the opposite of poverty is justice.

Read an excerpt of Just Mercy

death row

civil rights