Digital Commons Network^™

What Notice Did, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

In the twenty-first century, copyright protection is automatic. It vests in eligible works the instant that those works are first embodied in a tangible format. Many Americans are unaware of that, believing instead that registration and copyright notice are required to secure a copyright. That impression is understandable. For its first 199 years, United States copyright law required authors to take affirmative steps to obtain copyright protection. The first U.S. copyright statute, enacted by Congress in 1790, required the eligible author of an eligible work to record the title of the work with the clerk of the court in the …

What Notice Did, Jessica D. Litman

Law & Economics Working Papers

In the 21st century, copyright protection is automatic. It vests in eligible works the instant that those works are first embodied in a tangible format. Many Americans are unaware of that, believing instead that registration and copyright notice are required to secure a copyright. That impression is understandable. For its first 199 years, United States copyright law required authors to take affirmative steps to obtain copyright protection. The first U.S. copyright statute, enacted by Congress in 1790, required the eligible author of an eligible work to record the title of the work with the clerk of the court in the …

Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law., Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson

Articles

In this section: • Agreement on Iran Nuclear Program Goes into Effect • United States and China Reach Agreement Regarding Economic Espionage and International Cybersecurity Norms • United States Ratifies the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism • United States Reaches Agreement with Turkey on Use of Incirlik Air Base for Strikes on ISIL; “Safe Zone” Not Part of the Deal

Diagnostics Need Not Apply, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Diagnostic testing helps caregivers and patients understand a patient's condition, predict future outcomes, select appropriate treatments, and determine whether treatment is working. Improvements in diagnostic testing are essential to bringing about the long-heralded promise of personalized medicine. Yet it seems increasingly clear that most important advances in this type of medical technology lie outside the boundaries of patent-eligible subject matter. The clarity of this conclusion has been obscured by ambiguity in the recent decisions of the Supreme Court concerning patent eligibility. Since its 2010 decision in Bilski v. Kappos, the Court has followed a discipline of limiting judicial exclusions from …

Silent Similarity, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

From 1909 to 1930, U.S. courts grappled with claims by authors of prose works claiming that works in a new art form—silent movies—had infringed their copyrights. These cases laid the groundwork for much of modern copyright law, from their broad expansion of the reproduction right, to their puzzled grappling with the question how to compare works in dissimilar media, to their confusion over what sort of evidence should be relevant to show copyrightability, copying and infringement. Some of those cases—in particular, Nichols v. Universal Pictures—are canonical today. They are not, however, well-understood. In particular, the problem at the heart of …

Reconciling Intellectual And Personal Property, Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

Articles

This Article examines both the forces undermining copy ownership and the important functions it serves within the copyright system in order to construct a workable notion of consumer property rights in digital media.

Part I begins by examining the relationship between intellectual and personal property. Sometimes courts have treated those rights as inseparable, as if transfer of a copy entails transfer of the intangible right, or retention of the copyright entails ongoing control over particular copies. But Congress and most courts have recognized personal and intellectual property as interests that can be transferred separately. Although the better view, this approach …

Campbell At 21/Sony At 31, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

When copyright lawyers gather to discuss fair use, the most common refrain is its alarming expansion. Their distress about fair use’s enlarged footprint seems completely untethered from any appreciation of the remarkable increase in exclusive copyright rights. In the nearly forty years since Congress enacted the 1976 copyright act, the rights of copyright owners have expanded markedly. Copyright owners’ demands for further expansion continue unabated. Meanwhile, they raise strident objections to proposals to add new privileges and exceptions to the statute to shelter non-infringing uses that might be implicated by their expanded rights. Copyright owners have used the resulting uncertainty …

Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The Actavis decision punted more than it decided. Although narrowing the range of possible outcomes by rejecting the legal rules at the extremes and opting for a rule of reason middle ground, the opinion failed to grapple with the most challenging issues of regulatory policy raised by pharmaceutical patent settlements. In particular, it failed to clearly delineate the social costs of permitting and disallowing patent settlements, avoided grappling with the crucial issues of patent validity and infringement, and erroneously focused on “reverse payments” as a distinctive antitrust problem when equally or more anticompetitive settlements can be crafted without reverse payments. …

Panel Iii: Politics And The Public In Ip & Info Law Policy Making, Michael J. Burstein, Derek Khanna, Jessica D. Litman, Sherwin Siy, Richard S. Whitt

Other Publications

We have been moving gradually from the theoretical to the practical. Having examined the impact of critical legal studies ("CLS") in the academy and having discussed the intersection between scholarship and activism, we now turn to the nitty-gritty questions of how to actually enact change in intellectual property and information law and policy.

Prometheus Rebound: Diagnostics, Nature, And Mathematical Algorithms, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

The Supreme Court’s decision last Term in Mayo v. Prometheus left considerable uncertainty as to the boundaries of patentable subject matter for molecular diagnostic inventions. First, the Court took an expansive approach to what counts as an unpatentable natural law by applying that term to the relationship set forth in the challenged patent between a patient’s levels of a drug metabolite and the indication of a need to adjust the patient’s drug dosage. And second, in evaluating whether the patent claims add enough to this unpatentable natural law to be patent eligible, the Court did not consult precedents concerning the …

Patents And Regulatory Exclusivity, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Book Chapters

This article reexamines the sources of exclusivity for drugs, considers their limitations, and evaluates exclusivity under the new biologics legislation in light of these limitations. The current overlapping legal protections for exclusivity in the pharmaceutical marketplace reflect a series of political compromises, repeatedly renegotiated to correct for unintended consequences in the previous version of the rules. Patents and patent challenges play a central role in this system of protection, and many of the patents at stake are ultimately held invalid in litigation. It is not easy to untangle a complex legal regime that allocates billions of dollars of profits. But …

Wisdom Of The Ages Or Dead-Hand Control? Patentable Subject Matter For Diagnostic Methods After In Re Bilski, Rebecca Sue Eisenberg

Law & Economics Working Papers

For a quarter century following the landmark 1980 decision of the Supreme Court in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, inventions and discoveries in biotechnology research appeared to be eligible for patent protection, assuming they meet the statutory standards for patent protection. The Supreme Court reopened the issue of patentable subject matter in 2005 when it granted certiorari in Laboratory Corporation v. Metabolite on the question of whether a method of diagnosing vitamin deficiency by observing a biomarker was unpatentable as a “basic scientific relationship.” Although the Court later dismissed the case without reaching a decision on the merits, since that time the …

Antibiotic Resistance, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

Ten years ago, when I wrote War Stories,' copyright lawyers were fighting over the question whether unlicensed personal, noncommercial copying, performance or display would be deemed copyright infringement. I described three strategies that lawyers for book publishers, record labels, and movie studios had deployed to try to assure that the question was answered the way they wanted it to be. First, copyright owners were labeling all unlicensed uses as "piracy" on the ground that any unlicensed use might undermine copyright owners' control. That epithet helped to obscure the difference between unlicensed uses that invaded defined statutory exclusive rights and other …

Wisdom Of The Ages Or Dead-Hand Control? Patentable Subject Matter For Diagnostic Methods After In Re Bilski, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

In 1980, the Supreme Court gave a reassuring signal to the then-nascent biotechnology industry about the availability of patent protection for the fruits of its research when it upheld the patentability of a genetically modified living organism in Diamond v. Chakrabarty. Twenty-five years later, the Court seemed poised to reexamine the limits of patentable subject matter for advances in the life sciences when it granted certiorari in Laboratory Corporation v. Metabolite. But the Federal Circuit had not addressed the patentable subject matter issue in Laboratory Corporation, and the Court ultimately dismissed the certiorari p etition as improvidently granted. Five years …

Antibiotic Resistance, Jessica Litman

Law & Economics Working Papers

In this essay, written for the 30th Anniversary of Cardozo’s Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, I revisit the ruinous litigation strategy copyright owners pursued after Napster to secure control of the market for personal uses of copyrighted works, which I wrote about ten years ago in War Stories, 20 Cardozo Arts & Ent. L.J. 337 (2002). The litigation campaign had effects that copyright owners now have reason to regret. Medical experts tell us that powerful antibiotics are highly effective in killing off both good and bad bacteria, but at a significant risk. Bugs that survive the treatment grow bigger, stronger, …

Patent Costs And Unlicensed Use Of Patented Inventions, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Recent commentators have observed, and sometimes lamented, significant gaps between the formal reach of the patent system and the practical exclusionary effect of patent law. It is costly for technology developers to obtain and assert patents, for technology users to identify the patents they might be infringing and to clear rights, and for the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to find patent-defeating prior art. The costs of the patent system provide shelter for infringing behavior that might otherwise lead to either licensing or liability, perhaps mitigating excesses in the patent system while retaining strong rights that motivated owners may enforce. …

Readers' Copyright, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

My goal in this project is to reclaim copyright for readers (and listeners, viewers, and other members of the audience). I think, and will try to persuade you, that the gradual and relatively recent disappearance of readers’ interests from the core of copyright’s perceived goals has unbalanced the copyright system. It may have prompted, at least in part, the scholarly critique of copyright that has fueled copyright lawyers’ impression that “so many in academia side with the pirates.” It may also be responsible for much of the deterioration in public support for copyright. I argue here that copyright seems out …

Costs, Norms, And Inertia: Avoiding An Anticommons For Proprietary Research Tools, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Book Chapters

A decade ago the scientific community was sounding alann bells about the impact of intellectual property on the ability of scientists to do their work. Protracted negotiations over access to patented mice and genes, scientific databases, and tangible research materials all pointed toward the same conclusion: that intellectual property claims were undennining traditional sharing norms to the detriment of science. Michael Heller and I highlighted one dimension of this concern: that too many intellectual property rights in 'upstream' research results could paradoxically restrict 'downstream' research and product development by making it too costly and burdensome to collect all the necessary …

Patent Pools, Rand Commitments, And The Problematics Of Price Discrimination, Daniel A. Crane

Book Chapters

The social welfare problematics of patent pooling by competitors are well known. Competitor patent pooling has the potential to create powerful efficiencies by eliminating holdout problems and blocking positions and reducing transactions costs from licensing negotiations. At the same time, competitors can use patent pools to cartelize in a variety of ways, for example by fixing prices, entrenching patents of dubious validity, and discouraging rivalry for innovation. Determining legal norms capable of capturing the efficiencies without enabling cartels has not proven easy.

Perhaps because of the practical difficulty of separating pro-competitive from anticompetitive pools, antitrust scrutiny has swung from extreme …

The Invention Of Common Law Play Right, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

This Article explores playwrights' common law "play right." Since this conference celebrates the 300th birthday of the Statute of Anne, I begin in England in the 17th Century. I find no trace of a common law playwright's performance right in either the law or the customary practices surrounding 17th and 18th century English theatre. I argue that the nature and degree of royal supervision of theatre companies and performance during the period presented no occasion (and, indeed, left no opportunity) for such a right to arise. I discuss the impetus for Parliament's enactment of a performance right statute in 1833, …

Real Copyright Reform, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

A copyright system is designed to produce an ecology that nurtures the creation, dissemination, and enjoyment of works of authorship. When it works well, it encourages creators to generate new works, assists intermediaries in disseminating them widely, and supports readers, listeners, and viewers in enjoying them. If the system poses difficult entry barriers to creators, imposes demanding impediments on intermediaries, or inflicts burdensome conditions and hurdles on readers, then the system fails to achieve at least some of its purposes. The current U.S. copyright statute is flawed in all three respects. In this Article, I explore how the current copyright …

Fixing Ram Copies, Aaron Perzanowski

Articles

Scholars, litigants, and courts have debated the status of so-called “RAM copies” - instantiations of copyrighted works in the random access memory of computing devices - for decades. The Second Circuit’s decision in Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings has recently reignited the controversy over these putative copies. There the court held that CSC did not create copies within the meaning of the Copyright Act when it buffered fleeting segments of television programs. In many respects, the Second Circuit’s holding is a straightforward application of the Act’s nested definitions of “copies” and “fixed.” But because the court declined to apply the …

The Copyright Principles Project: Directions For Reform, Jessica D. Litman, Pamela Samuelson, The Copyright Principles Project

Articles

Copyright law performs a number of important functions. It facilitates public access to knowledge and a wide range of uses of creative works of authorship, and, in so doing, it helps educate our populace, enrich our culture, and promote free speech, free expression, and democratic values. It provides opportunities for rights holders to recoup investments in creating and disseminating their works and to enjoy the fruits of whatever success arises from the public's uses of their works. In the process, copyright also plays a role in regulating new technologies and services through which creative works may be accessed. A well-functioning …

Patent Law, U.S., History Of., Howard Bromberg

Book Chapters

Contribution by Howard J. Bromberg to Great Lives from History: Inventors & Inventions

Bargaining In The Shadow Of Rate-Setting Courts, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Judges will tell you that they are comparatively poor rate regulators. The specialized, technical competence and supervisory capacity that public utilities commissions enjoy are usually absent from judicial chambers. Nonetheless, when granting antitrust remedies-particularly remedies for monopolistic abuse of intellectual property-courts sometimes purport to act as rate regulators for the licensing or sale of the defendant's assets. At the outset, we should distinguish between two forms ofjudicial rate setting. In one form, a court (or the FTC in its adjudicative capacity) grants a compulsory license and sets a specific rate as part of a final judgment or an order. The …

Intellectual Liability, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Intellectual property is increasingly a misnomer since the right to exclude is the defining characteristic of property and incentives to engage in inventive and creative activity are increasingly being granted in the form of liability rights (which allow the holder of the right to collect a royalty from users) rather than property rights (which allow the holder of the right to exclude others from using the invention or creation). Much of this recent reorientation in the direction of liability rules arises from a concern over holdout or monopoly power in intellectual property. The debate over whether liability rules or property …

The Copyright Revision Act Of 2026, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

As someone who teaches and writes about copyright law, I end up straddling two different worlds. On the one hand, I really do need to understand and be able to teach the details of the copyright statute and the case law construing it. My students need to know the difference between a public performance right under Section 106(4) and a public performance right by digital audio transmission under Section 106(6); they need to know the difference between the statutory licenses available under Section 114 and the statutory licenses available under Section 115.' So, I need to have all of those …

The Politics Of Intellectual Property, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

In May 2005, Keith Aoki invited me to participate on a panel on "The Politics of Copyright Law" at the 2006 Association of American Law Schools ("A.A.L.S. ") mid-year meeting workshop on Intellectual Property in Vancouver, British Columbia. The panel, renamed "The Politics of Intellectual Property," and moderated by Keith, included talks by Justin Hughes, Mark Lemley, Jay Thomas, and me, and it was followed by three concurrent sessions on "The Politics Concerning Moral Rights," "The Politics of Global Intellectual Property, " and "The Politics of Patent Reform." I'm not sure what the organizing committee had in mind when it …

Tactics And Terms In The Negotiation Of Electronic Resource Licenses, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

This chapter introduces the reader to the realm of electronic resource license agreements. It provides the reader with an overview of basic contract law as it relates to electronic resource licensing. The chapter then discusses the electronic resource license negotiation process as well as license agreement term clauses. The aim of this chapter is to provide librarians with an understanding of basic licensing concepts and language in order to aid librarians in the review and negotiation of their own license agreements. The author hopes to impart lessons and tips he has learned in reviewing and negotiating license agreements with a …

Billowing White Goo, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

The title of this symposium is the question: "Fair Use: "Incredibly Shrinking" or Extraordinarily Expanding?" I'd argue that the answer to the question is "no." Fair use isn't doing either. The size of the fair use footprint has stayed remarkably constant over the past 30 or even 50 years. What has expanded, extraordinarily, is the size of rights granted by the copyright law. It may seem as if fair use is either expanding or shrinking, because the greater reach of copyright has made a bunch of uses potentially fair that weren't even potentially infringing 50 years ago. In order to …