Art and Design Commons^™

Technology Matters: The Courts, Media Neutrality, And New Technologies, Deborah Tussey

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

This article explores the copyright principle of media neutrality in the context of three sets of cases dealing with videogame enhancements, database compilations, and peer-to-peer file sharing. In each set of cases, at least one court produces a judgment which relies heavily on technological distinctions among electronic storage and retrieval systems, in apparent contravention of the media neutrality principle. Media neutrality confers fairly broad authority on courts to extend protection to copyrighted content distributed through new technologies. However, judicial concerns about the relative institutional competencies of Congress and the courts, most clearly expressed in the Sony decision, rightly impose limitations …