Legal Commentary

I did NOT disrespect Jay-Z

By David Kopel

Earlier this week, I was the subject of a false Tweet. It claimed, more or less: ? Everybody?s jaw in the room dropped when @davekopel said that Jay ?Z is the most over-rated hip-hop artist. LOL.? This way followed by a link, which (being in the typical TinyURL format) gave no clue as to its destination.

The destination was a website written in Japanese. It?s probably true that at least some of the people who follow me on Twitter would be mildly curious about this alleged incident. However, very, very few of my Twitter followers can read Japanese. So the phony tweet was not a particularly well-crafted example of Twitter spam.

For the record, until I saw the aforesaid Tweet, I had never had an opinion on Jay-Z, never expressed an opinion on Jay-Z, and never possessed any basis of knowledge about whether his high rating among hip hop fans was deserved. However, this week I used my Zune to download Jay-Z?s latest album, The Blueprint 3. I love how the Zune makes it possible to check out an entire album of unfamiliar material, at zero marginal cost. So yesterday I listened to the album, and thought it was pretty good. I don?t particularly like hip hop, but even I could tell that Jay-Z is pretty talented.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on September 18, 2010 (boomark / email).