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Faculty Scholarship

2019

Texas A&M University School of Law

Copyright

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A Natural Right To Copy, Glynn Lunney Dec 2019

A Natural Right To Copy, Glynn Lunney

Faculty Scholarship

In this symposium, we gather to celebrate the work of Wendy Gordon. In this essay, I revisit her article, A Property Right in Self-Expression: Equality and Individualism in the Natural Law of Intellectual Property. In the article, Professor Gordon first used the "no-harm" principle of John Locke to justify copyright as natural right and then used his “enough-and-as-good” proviso to limit that right. Her second step turned natural rights approaches to copyright on its head. Through it, she showed that even if we accept copyright as natural right, that acceptance does not necessarily lead to a copyright of undue breadth …


A Tale Of Two Copyrights, Glynn Lunney Jul 2019

A Tale Of Two Copyrights, Glynn Lunney

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores two possible copyright regimes. The first uses costless and perfect price discrimination to enable copyright owners to capture the full market or exchange value of their work. The second also uses costless and perfect price discrimination, but allows copyright owners to capture only the persuasion cost for authoring and distributing a work. We can call the first regime, costless copyright maximalism, and the second, costless copyright minimalism. The choice between these two regimes is primarily distributional: Should we design copyright to allocate the surplus associated with copyrighted works to copyright owners or to copyright consumers? This essay …