Digital Commons Network^™

Licensing As Digital Rights Management, From The Advent Of The Web To The Ipad, Reuven Ashtar

Reuven Ashtar

This Article deals with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provision, Section 1201, and its relationship to licensing. It argues that not all digital locks and contractual notices qualify for legal protection under Section 1201, and attributes the courts’ indiscriminate protection of all Digital Rights Management (DRM) measures to the law’s incoherent formulation. The Article proposes a pair of filters that would enable courts to distinguish between those DRM measures that qualify for protection under Section 1201, and those that do not. The filters are shown to align with legislative intent and copyright precedent, as well as the approaches recently …

Theft, Transformation, And The Need Of The Immaterial: A Proposal For A Fair Use Digital Sampling Regime, Reuven Ashtar

Reuven Ashtar

Theft, Transformation, and the Need of the Immaterial:

A Proposal for a Fair Use Digital Sampling Regime

ABSTRACT

At its inception, American copyright law had a clear purpose: to incentivize creativity. To this end, the Framers reluctantly granted monopolies to authors. This paper examines the extent to which their original intention has been forgotten, and their granting of monopolies abused, in contemporary practice. It does so through the examination of a specific case: that of sampling—the process of manipulating pre-existing sound recordings and incorporating them in one’s music. While licensing is an expensive and demanding process, imaginative unlicensed borrowing is …