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Intellectual Property Law

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2023

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Do Automated Legal Threats Reduce Freedom Of Expression Online? Results From A Natural Experiment, J. Nathan Matias, Merry Ember Mou, Jonathon W. Penney, Maximilian Klein, Lucas Wright Apr 2023

Do Automated Legal Threats Reduce Freedom Of Expression Online? Results From A Natural Experiment, J. Nathan Matias, Merry Ember Mou, Jonathon W. Penney, Maximilian Klein, Lucas Wright

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Automated law enforcement systems support privately-operated enforcement bots to take legal action in hundreds of millions of cases a year. In the area of copyright, legal scholars have hypothesized the existence of “chilling effects” that harm public discourse by influencing people to self-censor protected speech. We test this hypothesis in a large-scale quasi-experiment with 9,818 accounts on Twitter that made 5,171,111 tweets. In a confirmatory interrupted time-series analysis, we find evidence that people reduce how much they post online after receiving a take-down notice from a copyright enforcement bot. On average, accounts sent fewer tweets after enforcement (p<0.001). Accounts also changed from a daily increase in public tweets to a decline on average (p<0.001). We also report on novel software that conducts third-party monitoring of the behavioral outcomes of automated law-enforcement systems. Since automated law enforcement can influence public discourse, third-party monitoring like this report will be essential to governing the power of enforcement algorithms in society.


Against Integrity: A Feminist Theory Of Moral Rights, Creative Agency & Attribution, Carys Craig, Anupriya Dhonchak Jan 2023

Against Integrity: A Feminist Theory Of Moral Rights, Creative Agency & Attribution, Carys Craig, Anupriya Dhonchak

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This Chapter explores insights that feminist theories can bring to the study and development of moral rights protections in copyright law. It begins by explaining why certain facets of conventional moral rights theory are ill-suited to—indeed inconsistent with—a feminist approach in both concept and effect. In particular, to the extent that strong moral rights of integrity and association limit dialogic engagement with, and transformation of, protected works, they risk suppressing critical and counter-hegemonic expression, and support an individualized and romanticized conception of the (patriarchal) author-figure. Employing alternative feminist conceptions of situated selfhood, relationality and dialogic authorship, the Chapter then explores …


Gripe Sites & Trademark User Rights: Lessons From Canada’S Cooperstock Case, Carys Craig Jan 2023

Gripe Sites & Trademark User Rights: Lessons From Canada’S Cooperstock Case, Carys Craig

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This Chapter is concerned with the nature of trademarks as vehicles of expression. It takes, as its lesson study, the unfortunate Canadian Federal Court case of United Airlines v. Cooperstock in which a disgruntled United passenger quite spectacularly failed in his efforts to defend a trademark parody on his consumer complaints “gripe” site. The case demonstrates the risks of relying on trademark law’s internal limits and implicit exceptions to define the boundaries of the trademark owner’s control. I argue, first, that the case therefore underscores the need for explicit statutory exceptions to ensure breathing space for parody, criticism, and other …