What is it that you give up when you join a company?

Do you own your own time to dream?

Basically, Mattel is arguing that even if you come up with things that are in your dreams at night, they own it.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the rule

of law. I am Dahlia Lithwick, and I write about those things for Slate. And while the

Supreme Court is off vacationing this summer, we are hosting a kind of legal geek book club

with a series of scorching, sizzling summer legal beach reads about the court, which is like a thing.

And this week, I'm actually not kidding. This is a beach book about the courts.

And I'm delighted to welcome Professor Orly Lobel to the show. Orley is a professor of law at San Diego.

And she's going to talk with us today about her award-winning book, You Don't Own Me. It was published last year.

She was the author of a 2013 book called Talent

Wants to Be Free about corporate innovation and secrecy and what she thinks of as cognitive

property. So interesting. This newer book, You Don't Own Me, actually takes that focus on

intellectual property, but directs it at an epic legal battle involving

high-heeled blonde dolls, we call them Barbies, and crazy corporate espionage. So Orley, welcome to

Amicus. Thank you. Now I'm going to say the sentence that I never thought I would say on

amicus, which is this is about Barbie,

and it's about Barbie versus Brats. And it's an amazing legal pylon that lasts for a decade.

But I want you to just before we get into what the book is about, help listeners understand why there's a through line, you know,

all the work that you've been doing about intellectual property and keeping secrets and who

owns ideas. There's a straight through line between Talent wants to Be Free, your last book, and this one, right?

Absolutely. I started working on researching really deeply this case that that's the basis of

...